Bureaucracy
 Most of people do not think of bureaucracies in a positive
light.
 The answer to our simple questions is usually forwarded
from desk to desk.
 The term bureaucracy typically refers to the agencies of
government, but bureaucracy is also a form of organization
found in both the public and private sectors.
 Therefore it is an organization refers to assembling various
elements of labor and expertise in a way that enables
complex tasks to be accomplished.
 There is no doubt that bureaucracies play a vital role in our
lives.
 They provide police protection, put out fires, regulate land
use, educate children, maintain our highway system,
propose new laws and ordinances, write budgets, and
implement public policies.
 Private corporations are also bureaucracies by definition,
and they build automobiles and television sets, handle our
personal banking, provide insurance for our homes and
personal health, and provide air transportation, all of which
make our lives in the modern world more pleasant.
 Particularly in the US, public bureaucracies are often
thought of as offices staffed with mindless bureaucrats,
who are overpaid, unresponsive, inefficient, impersonal,
and often arrogant.
 They operate with little control from either elected officials
or voters.
 They have been insulated by civil service regulations,
which were originally implemented to protect them from
political forces under the belief that neutral competence
was a worthy value.
 The bureaucracy is often portrayed as the problem with
government-the reason that government does not seem to
be able to accomplish much.
 The bureaucracy sometimes does very absurd things like
issuing visas for 2 of the highjackers about 6 months after
they died in the World Trade Center crashes in 2001.
 Similarly, a Chicago cancer patient applied for Medicare
and she received a letter saying that she was not eligible
since she had died more than a year earlier.
 A crazy example happened in state of Virginia, in USA.
 A citizen received a legal notice about his overdue taxes.
 The notice stated that if the bill were not paid promptly,
Prince William Country would take legal action.
 The amount due was one cent only!
 Government decisions do not make a lot of sense always.
 During the mid-1980s, the state of Pennsylvania was paying
around $500,000 each year to the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie
Railroad, which was used for about 250 passengers each day.
 At this price, the state could have bought each rider a new car
every three years.
 The federal government continues to operate Amtrak despite the
fact that it loses more than one billion dollars each year.
 Wasteful policies tarnish the image of government in the eyes of
citizens. Tales of agencies paying $600 for toilet seats or more
than $7000 for coffee makers do little to help the image of
government or public bureaucracies regardless of how the cost
are justified.
 Is bureaucracy unnecessary then?
 The same wasteful government also fights wars, provides
national defense, helps to eradicate diseases, assists in
managing the economy, provides the infrastructure needed for a
modern society that is constantly changing.
 We should keep in mind that all modern societies are
administered societies.
 Large organizations dominate the social landscape, and to
function effectively in modern society, we must deal with these
organizations as a customer, citizen, client, or a member.
 Max Weber was the first to articulate and define the nature of
bureaucracies in the early part of the 20th century.
 He believed that bureaucracies were rational and necessary
to organize modern societies because of the complexity of
society itself.
 Weber believed that bureaucracies tend to have certain
characteristics such as hierarchical structure, a chain of
command, division of labor and specialization of labor,
routine behavior that follows standardized procedures,
promotion based on demonstrated performance, a goal
orientation that emphasizes the efficient and effective
attainment of the organization’s goals and productivity.
 Hierarchical structure is the formal organizational structure
illustrated in organizational charts.
 It simply means that there is a top and a bottom to the
organization, with some type of executive leadership at the
top overseeing various specialized departments.
 In his view, the organization should be shaped like a
pyramid.
 However, organizations can be “tall” or “flat”.
 Tall organizations have a lot of departments and supervisors
between the top and the lower levels of the organization.
 Flat structures have fewer supervisors and middle
managements between the executives and rank-and-file
areas of the organization.
 Tall organizations tend to centralize power, whereas flat
organizations decentralize authority as much as possible.
 Economist John Kenneth Galbraith believed that the
modern corporation is not managed by a powerful
individual, but by a committee.
 The committee is comprised of high-level managers, and
specialists such as lawyers, accountants, and engineers
form the technostructure.
 A chain of command refers to the fact that everyone has a
boss or a supervisor.
 Division of labor and specialization of labor means that a
bureaucracy divides labor into specialized units.
 For instance, universities typically break their work into a
lot of divisions, such as administration, various colleges
and schools that have broad areas of expert knowledge and
then into academic departments.
 Within the academic departments, even professors have
specialized areas of expertise.
 Routine behavior that follows standardized procedures:
Bureaucracies assemble expertise by definition, but they
carry out their duties following established, routine
procedures.
 Promotion based on demonstrated performance: Promotion
should be based on individual performance rather than on
the whims of a supervisor.
 People who perform their jobs well should not be
discriminated against, since the purpose of the organization
is to perform a variety of complex tasks.
 Merit system should be based on some standards that
measure performance under equal conditions for
everybody.
 A goal orientation that emphasizes the efficient and
effective attainment of an organization’s goals.
 Organizations exist for a purpose, whether it is managing
the parks and recreation resources of a city, collecting taxes
for the government or manufacturing and selling
automobiles.
 Productivity, whereby all work and actions are evaluated
according to established rules, and control of employees
according to specific rules and procedures that are
supposed to be applied impersonally to everyone.
 In bureaucracies, everyone is supposed to be treated in
accordance with established, standard operating
procedures.
 This helps build stability and continuity for the
organization and its workers, and it enhances productivity.
Take a Closer Look at Bureaucracy
 Bureaucracy is often thought of as an organizational chart
with someone at the top, departments scattered through the
middle, and other departments at the bottom.
 Most organizations have an organizational chart to
illustrate their chain of command.
 The power of a bureaucracy comes from its ability to
organize itself in such a way that very complex tasks can be
performed.
 For instance, all the rules and regulations that govern a
university are made using bureaucratic procedures.
 But, is there any other way to organize a university?
 Is there any other way to organize a corporation?
 To date, we know of no method by which to organize large
institutions other than the bureaucratic system.
 The alternatives to bureaucracy that do exist are inadequate
in a modern complex society.
 Bureaucracies are often criticized for growing and
growing.
 Tasks that once could be performed by only a few people
eventually require much larger staffs, more directors, more
money, and additional resources.
 The resources that public bureaucracies rely on do not
mainly come from selling goods and services to the public.
 Funding is secured through the budgetary process.
 Critics argue that in the private sector, businesses can only
grow if they generate enough sales in the marketplace to
pay for the growth.
 When it comes to the public sector, critics claim that
government is overproducing services to advance agencies’
powers and build empires.
 Thus, some argue that government grows unnecessarily
because there is no connection between the sources of the
funds that pay for government to operate and the work that an
agency performs.
 In the private sector, the link is the price charged for goods or
services, and customers choose whether to buy whatever a
firm has to offer.
 This link is missing in government because the revenues
come from taxes, and not from sales that must be generated
in the marketplace.
 So, government is criticized for creating a large,
cumbersome, inefficient bureaucracy that continues to grow,
overproduce services, and not looking after the public’s
 There are two types of philosophy in bureaucracy in the
world: one is the notion that bureaucrats know everything
better than those elected officials and they should tell them
how to do the things and implement the policies.
 The other one is that elected officials should appoint their
bureaucrats on the corners of the bureaucracy so that they are
able to implement the policies that they promised people
during election campaigns.
 The first one represents the British way of bureaucracy, while
the American way of bureaucracy tends to follow the second
path.
 Turkey, for a long time, followed the British example and
elected officials such as prime minister and ministers have
Inside Bureaucracy
 What types of officials administer public bureaucracies?
 According to Anthony Downs, who published an insightful
book titled Inside Bureaucracy in 1966; those who run public
bureaucracies fall into five “ideal-types” of bureaucrats.
 These are labeled as climbers, advocates, zealots, statesmen,
and conservers.
 The basic classification that separates these people is their
motives.
 Climbers and conservers are considered self-interested
officials.
 Climbers are bureaucrats motivated solely by the desire to
maximize their own personal power, income, and status.
 They tend to be the rising stars who will take whatever
action is needed to advance their own goals.
 Once they have reached the highest point they can achieve
in a bureau, they tend to jump ship to another bureau to
continue to advance their careers and self-interest.
 Promotion and success is what drives their motivation.
 Climbers are found at the lowest levels of the organization
partly because new recruits tend to have greater ambitions
since their careers are just beginning.
 Conservers regard convenience and security as paramount
to their self-interest.
 In contrast to climbers, conservers seek merely to retain the
amount of power, income, and prestige that they already
have.
 They tend to protect the status quo and resist change.
 They also tend to be very rule-oriented because they use
rules and regulations to resist change.
 In organizations, climbers can become conservers when
they no longer believe that they can advance their careers
further.
 Conservers are more prominent in the middle levels of
bureaus.
 Those who have reached the peaks of their careers and
middle-aged people who have lost their youthful energy are
more likely to be conservers.
 Zealots, advocates and statesmen are mixed-motive officials.
 Zealots are loyal to relatively narrow policies or concepts,
such as the development of certain military arms, like missile
defense systems and nuclear submarines.
 They seek power both for its own sake and to advance the
policies to which they are fanatically loyal-so called sacred
policies.
 They are very optimistic, energetic, and aggressive.
 They are found in newer agencies and often are the reason
that new agencies are created.
 Zealots are highly focused on a narrow cause, which tends
to make them poor general administrators.
 Advocates are loyal to a broader set of functions or to a
broader organization than zealots.
 They also seek power because they want to have significant
influence on policies and actions concerning those
functions or organizations.
 Advocates tend to promote the ideals of an agency, such as
law enforcement or environmental protection, but in a
much broader way than zealots.
 Advocates are found in all levels of organizations, but are
very prone to be involved with newer organizations.
 They are optimistic and energetic, but they are far more
directed than zealots.
 Thus, they are more likely to listen to their supervisors,
peers and subordinates.
 Advocates at higher levels of organization espouse to
broader policy goals than those at lower levels.
 They are the largest single group of the five ideal-types and
tend to make good general administrators.
 Statesmen are different from any of the other types.
 They are loyal to society as a whole, and they have a desire to
attain the power necessary to have a significant influence on
national policies.
 They are altruistic to a large degree because they are loyal to
the “general welfare” and committed to serving the public
interest.
 Thus, they are seen as ideal bureaucrat often by some
because they sincerely do seek to serve a greater public good.
 Statesmen vary in energy from being lazy to hyper-active.
 Lazy statesmen promote very broad view but take little
action; good critics but poor achievers.
 Statesmen are inclined to be philosophical and academic
because their broad views often conflict with their narrow
areas of functional responsibility in the organization.
 They tend to be found at the highest and lower levels of
organizations since they are usually loyal to society as a
whole.
 One can see that whichever ideal-type controls an
organization would likely affect how the organization
behaved.
 Is there a life cycle for bureaucracies-agencies?
 Are bureaus closed down after a while?