Pros and Cons of Bureaucracy and its effect on public entities

Pros and Cons of Bureaucracy and its effect on public entities

Introduction

Bureaucracy is considered as the main structure of the political system of America. It is a governing institution that characterizes modernity. Bureaucracy plays a significant role in the public administration and it is important for the bureaucratic institutions to be competent to perform according to laws (AL brow, M., 1970). The competency greatly depends on the individuals who work within this system. Their competency would mean the competency of the whole bureaucratic institution (Richard, 2002). This paper discusses the foundations of Administration and Politics laid by German sociologist Max Weber. Further, the discussion encompasses thoughts of Dwight Waldo about relations of democracy with bureaucracy and later the bureaucracy of Karl Marx (Michael, 2005). These sociologists were the most influential individuals of the nineteenth century. Their views were similar on some context and highly differentiated on others. The views of Farazmand and his contributors examine different kinds of organizations to determine the types and functions of organizations. They go on to explain how the organizations distribute and exercise power which is dominated in the corporate structure. Further, they also examined the activity of organizing human tasks to solve problems. They provide with analysis and conceptual perspectives on modern organizations, their functions and roles (Farazmand, 2002).

Discussion

Max Weber was a strong believer of the fact that bureaucracy could be understood by its typical characteristics and those will become more persistent as the modern age advanced. However, many criticized Weber's account of bureaucracy on various reasons especially the rationale he provided (Charles, 2009). There is an alternative view proposed which discusses the act that state borne bureaucracies are developed by high powered politics (AL brow, M., 1970).

Modernity of Bureaucracy

The start of Max Weber's bureaucracy started from identification of few typical characteristics that persisted in the officials that time (Chatterjee, P., 2011). He claimed that today the structure of the officials was such that they were full time employees hired on salaries and whose development of appointment, promotion and retirement was based on contracts and are highly trained with proper knowledge of their rights and duties as defined by the government (Richard, 2002). However, he argued that in previous times this was not the case as administration of the state was much more personalized and worked as part time employees (AL brow, M., 1970). He argued that modern bureaucracy had emerged in other sectors as well such as the church, military, political parties and private enterprises. He believed that modern bureaucracy was spreading in the society and the emergence of bureaucracy is a long term which he incorporated as key element (Charles, 2009). He was interested in emergence of bureaucracy as a major element of creating modernity. However, at the same time the evolution of bureaucracy was highly doubted by him and thus, his personal ides of modern bureaucracy had amounted to his own myopic vision (Charles & Anne, 1994). He reinstated that there is a ...