BUREAUCRACY

Don K. Rowney

"Bureaucracy" is a name given to hierarchical authority structures in modern, complex organizations. Historically, the term has applied to state organizations and to the structure of the behavior of officials until well into the twentieth century. Increasingly, after World War I, bureaucracy has been a concept and term that scholars have applied to firms and large civic organizations, often with the implications of cumbersome inefficiency and impersonal insensitivity in dealings with the public or clients.

BUREAUCRACY AS A CONCEPT AND ORGANIZATIONAL TYPE

Scholars' use of the terms "bureaucracy" and "bureaucratization" is largely owing to the influence of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who applied it mainly to agencies of the state. But to think of a bureaucracy merely as an office for the transaction of public business is similar to thinking of supersonic aircraft as a means of conveyance from point A to point B. Historically, the term has embodied an array of political, cultural, and philosophical viewpoints that, in turn, reflect the increasingly pervasive and intrusive presence of state and other large organizations into the modern history of European society. The continuing interest in Weber's work on this process, and the important contributions to this body of scholarship by students and critics of Weber, oblige any extended consideration of bureaucracy to be as much a history of ideas as one of institutions.

Students of modern European history often associate the extension of state administration with the "inevitable" secularization, rationalization, and extension of royal household functions. These developments are characterized as responding to the increasing complexity of military and political functions, commercial and industrial enterprise, as well as to urbanization and the European compulsion to create impersonal legal authorities in public life. This view is especially associated with Weber's work. Weber's near monopoly over thinking about bureaucracy and bureaucratization in modern Europe, however, did not take hold until the 1960s. Between the time of his death in 1920 and the mid-twentieth century—an era that witnessed an explosion in the number and scope of bureaucratic organizations—Weber's influence in Europe generally, and in Germany specifically, was comparatively limited. With the appearance in the 1950s and 1960s of several important studies of his work and influence by scholars such as Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and the convening of the Fifteenth Congress of the German Sociological Association in 1964, commemorating the centenary of his birth, the dominance of Weberian views of bureaucracy and bureaucratic development—the process of bureaucratization—was assured.

In the English-speaking world, Talcott Parsons's Structure of Social Action (1937) stimulated interest in German sociology and Weber's ideas about the origins of capitalism and bureaucracy in modern Europe. Later in his career, Parsons would adopt a more nuanced and critical view of Weberian organizational behavior. Nevertheless, Parsons's early understanding of Weber and bureaucratic structural development reinforced the growing importance of structural functionalism in the 1940s and 1950s and the work of the most influential American student of Weber, Reinhard Bendix.

Interpretations of Weber's understanding of bureaucracy are, in fact, based on syntheses of a vast and diverse array of his writings, in particular Economy and Society, The Religion of China, The Religion of India, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and General Economic History. Owing, moreover, to a proliferation of special editions and translations (especially into English) of Weber's original works, it can be difficult to trace the provenance of Weber's most famous and influential theories, including his views on bureaucracy and bureaucratization. This accounts, at least in part, for the continuing controversy over what Weber actually understood the phenomenon to be.

Weber thought that authority structures were the core of social organization but that such structures required validation, or legitimation, by underlying social values. Across an extraordinary range of historical and sociological studies, Weber developed a typology of authority that, depending upon historical circumstances, was reducible to one of three forms: traditional, charismatic, or legal. He thought, moreover, that legal authority was most (although not exclusively) typical of modern societies and expected this authority to broaden its scope and intensify over time. A continuing point of controversy among students of Weber is whether this view of authority and its role in society was prescriptive (or normative) or merely descriptive. In any case, the extension of written legal norms, together with an increasing dependence upon rational (as opposed, for example, to religious) standards of conduct in public life demanded the creation of the organizational structures and behavior that he called bureaucratic. While Weber recognized the importance of bureaucracies in premodern societies, he thought that the fusion of legal norms and rationality with such characteristics of modern life as complex technology, large concentrations of population, and widespread education created a circle of social, political, and economic energies that continually stimulated bureaucratic development in the contemporary world.

Although Weber's view of bureaucracy was explicitly and expertly rooted in historical research, his work, for the most part, does not seem intended to serve as detailed narrative descriptions of the emergence of modern state administrations. Thus, while histories of state and large nonstate bureaucracies written by other scholars are "Weberian" in the sense that they quite frequently draw upon Weber's ideas and use his terminology, the narratives themselves—their factual foundations and developmental sequences—often differ markedly from Weber's. Moreover, as is shown below, there are intellectual perspectives upon which one can draw for constructing and interpreting historical narratives of administrative development that are quite distinct from those that adopt the viewpoint that the history of administration is, in fact, the history of "bureaucratization."

Max Weber was born in Germany and grew up during the Second Empire, an era of remarkable efflorescence in the arts, science, and politics. The son of a successful lawyer, he was educated in the classics and received collegiate and postgraduate training at the Universities of Heidelberg, Göttingen, and Berlin, primarily in law. Eventually he received an appointment as a professor of economics at the University of Freiburg and, later, the University of Heidelberg. Weber's analyses of social structures, religion, and social behavior pervaded North American sociological writing from the late 1930s until the 1980s. His influence in Europe was more restricted than in the United States until the post–World War II period. He continues to dominate scholarship in the field of bureaucracy, although this influence is more limited today owing to increased use by firms and governmental bodies of research from fields such as organizational psychology.

One way of distinguishing schools of different historical narratives that use Weber's concepts and terminology is to ask how they understand the preconditions or generative circumstances for European bureaucratic development. These schools fall into two broad categories. The first is a school of political culture that lays great emphasis on a specific combination of historical circumstances—the need of central governments (usually monarchies) for the management of increasingly complex organizations of growing size and an increasing reliance, over time, upon formal legislation that serves as rules of public conduct. The second is a school of explanation based in economics that owes much to the rise, in the nineteenth century, of large-scale manufacturing and commercial enterprises. Although this work is often set within a Weberian frame of terminology, it also often integrates the analytic and interpretive work of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Literally, of course, the two schools do not form exclusive categories; in fact, Weber himself frequently combined economics and political culture as independent variables in models or typologies of bureaucratic development.

NARRATIVES OF BUREAUCRATIC DEVELOPMENT: BUREAUCRATIZATION

It is not difficult to find examples of hierarchical and functionally specialized bodies of officials in medieval Europe (for example, in both the court offices of the Holy Roman Empire and the curia of the Roman Catholic Church). Nevertheless, the transformation of secular territorial administrations into specialized administrations for war, finance, the operations of royal courts, and diplomatic and tax administration is generally a phenomenon of the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries throughout Europe, and not just in western and northern Europe, as some narratives would have it. Certain central government roles (such as taxation and warfare), however, were often coopted by regional territorial authorities or even transformed into commercial activities, with the erstwhile official—a tax farmer or a mercenary soldier, for example—assuming an entrepreneurial role between the state and the taxpayer. Thus it is difficult to find examples of the bureaucratization of state functions that develop in a linear process, moving straight from a traditional, patriarchal system rooted in the society of the royal court to a full-blown system of specializations and hierarchy legitimated by law and rationality.

Part of the reason why bureaucratization (or administrative development of any kind) was tentative and subject to reversal is owing to the limited functions of European states in society before 1800. Generally speaking, even in the eighteenth century state roles were overwhelmingly monopolized by waging war, preparing for war, and paying for recently concluded wars. Other state or court functions were comparatively modest, confined to intermittent diplomacy, the formal organization of the court itself, and, of course, the comparatively complicated functions of administering tax collections. As Fernand Braudel notes in The Wheels of Commerce, these fiscal operations were more smoothly accomplished in some states than in others. But, over time, the political control of military organizations and technology and especially management of the expense of warfare, obliged states to create offices that were staffed by full-time trained officials. As Weber notes, such individuals were often drawn, early on, from the clergy. These constituted one of the few small reservoirs of men in western Europe who were both educated and independent of the landed nobility with whom the monarch often competed.

Gradually, European states began to reach into unattended spheres of social life or, at any rate, to assume responsibility for activities previously in the charge of religious organizations, local communities, and families. For example, some states began, in the eighteenth century, to take an interest in primary education, the redistribution of land, the technical education of farmers, and relief of the circumstances of the poor. The resulting modest extensions of state roles became an occasion for bureaucratization. Eighteenth-century extensions of state roles into uncharted social waters were also often the occasion of virulent political debates over the quality and substance of state administrative roles, their efficiency, honesty, and what today would be called their cost-effectiveness.

Most famously, the effect of the English cleric Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was to convince some policymakers that the only effect of poor relief could be to enlarge the numbers of the poor through encouraging reproduction by a proportion similar to the degree of aid. Applied without limit, such unwise but well-intended aids would extend the problem of want indefinitely until all economic resources were exhausted. By the early nineteenth century, political confrontations over such issues introduced additional elements into what Weber would see as a self-reinforcing circle of bureaucratic enhancement. Demands for increased efficiency, reduced corruption, and the introduction of university-educated officials who, in contrast with officials of earlier generations, were not necessarily members of noble social elites or the clergy would intensify the process of bureaucratization itself.

This new era in the development of state administration often involved the expansion of bureaucracy into previously undergoverned segments of society and began the very slow inclusion of social groups—castes or classes—that previously were excluded from state roles. These developments, in turn, were accompanied by a growing need for formally specified organizational roles, a clearly defined authority structure, and rules that protected and legally defined the authority of officials who were not necessarily born into the ruling classes. By the nineteenth century the demand for administrators who were educated in the increasingly secular settings of universities or in institutions specially designed for the training of state officials, as in France, was strong and growing.

As John Armstrong notes in The European Administrative Elite (1973), however, various artificial roadblocks to the inclusion of lower classes in state administration were virtually universal. As a consequence, at least up to World War I, attempts at civil service reforms (such as those proposed in Britain by Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan in 1853) were very slow to take effect. Many seemingly practical structures and controls had the effect of slowing both social and operational change within services. These included the explicit division of state service into "higher" and "lower" echelons, and practical divisions into a favored and relatively influential central service and a disfavored, relatively obscure provincial service. Such service divisions combined with examination and educational criteria such as the "classics barrier," an educational bar that essentially excluded individuals who had not learned Greek and Latin by attending elite primary and secondary educational institutions. These constructions meant that, in civil administration and the military, "open elites" were rare until well after World War II. Indeed, a study published by the Economist magazine on 19 March 1994 showed that, again in Britain, the most senior positions in the civil service (the twenty offices of the permanent secretaries) were staffed exclusively by males who were overwhelmingly the products both of elite, private grammar schools and the Oxbridge universities. But the increasing pressure on both military and civil administrations to master and apply complex technologies as part of their operations often provided the wedge for lower class entrance into state service, at least at low and middle levels.

With urbanization, industrialization, and growth in population size, state roles—from mass education to welfare and public health—had expanded by the end of the nineteenth century. State offices increased in number and authority, as did the numbers of officials and the size of agency budgets. This increased bureaucratization also broadened opportunities for social mobility via official roles, gradually exceeding the capacity of upper classes to staff even elite offices in some European states.

VARIATIONS IN THE NARRATIVES OF BUREAUCRATIZATION

As noted above, many students of the history of bureaucracy explain bureaucratization in terms of the emergence of political and cultural factors—for example, rational and legal systems of valuing public behavior and political needs of rulers. Others understand the process of European bureaucratization within a framework of economic—rather than cultural and political—stimulus. In other words, they understand the experience as a product of other factors in addition to, or besides, growing rationality and legalism, and they see it as more varied across different European states, owing to the different tempos of the state's economic development. The weight of this second view results from the fact that much of the growth of large, complex organizations has historically occurred outside the boundaries of state institutions. Manufacturing and commercial firms, even early in the nineteenth century, illustrated many of the characteristics of bureaucracy that Weber found in state organizations. Moreover, as Adam Smith showed in the eighteenth century, specialized functions and expert roles were as important in efficient manufacturing as they were in the management of state budgets or artillery brigades. Economies of scale and control of markets that made trusts and combines common in many European countries, and conditions of secure employment that were gradually forced upon employers by professional and trade associations, made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between state and industrial bureaucracies. Moreover, the densely argued view of Karl Marx that large-scale capitalism would continue to expand until it was consumed in revolution meant that, as early as the second half of the nineteenth century, Europeans started to think of themselves as living in a world comprehensively dominated by bureaucracy. This was a vision that haunted such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche and became a touchstone for much of leftist politics before World War I.

In fact, the relative importance of both economic and political structures and behavior in accounting for the tempo of European bureaucratization sharply differentiates the experience of European societies in general. In eastern Europe and Russia as well as in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, different conditions applied, and narratives of bureaucratization have to be written that are different from those of the earliest industrializers. These differences are owing to significant variations both in political structures and in commercial and industrial behavior.

For example, studies of formal administrative systems in Italy have shown that the endurance of patrimonial forms of local government depended more on the survival or disappearance of forms of social organization than on the presence or absence of legal systems of a specific type. Robert Putnam, in Making Democracy Work (1993), in particular, sees long-enduring patterns in public and civic life as critical to differences in social adaptation to administrative systems, whatever the underlying system of law. These differences in forms of civic associations and of the public behavior of private citizens were central to Putnam's explanation of the variations in political development between northern and southern Italy in the late twentieth century.

Similarly, in his study of the history of bureaucratization in Sweden, Norway, Germany, France, and England, Rolf Torstendahl found substantial differences in the levels of both political centralization and bureaucratization over long periods of time. While they were fairly similar with respect to economic measures such as per capita income, urbanization, and levels of employment in manufacturing and commerce, these societies nevertheless demonstrated important differences in social and political traditions, "formed," as he put it, through their different histories.

Eastern Europe and especially Russia present unique problems for anyone interested in creating a narrative history of European bureaucratization. This is owing both to relatively delayed political and economic development and to the introduction of communist political systems in the twentieth century, with their highly centralized state civil administrations and centrally planned economies. Each of these historical circumstances presented special opportunities for the extension of state administrative roles. As Alexander Gerschenkron, among others, showed, the delayed introduction of industrialization and capitalism seems to have required enhanced state roles throughout eastern Europe and especially in Russia. There the need for rapid industrialization was underscored by the catastrophic failure of state foreign and military policy in both the Crimean War (1853–1856) and the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878). In both instances the weak performance of Russian arms in the face of strategic and tactical challenges that, fifty years earlier, Russia had successfully mastered, drove home the significance, in practice, of Russia's economic and technical backwardness. It was the state, rather than private enterprise, that took the lead in making the investment decisions essential to the development of heavy industry and the economic and social infrastructures essential to early industrialization.

Russian decisions to industrialize were thus not free of political and administrative freight. By the end of the nineteenth century, state roles in the national economy had burgeoned, with hundreds of new oversight agencies and scores of new programs designed to manage the social behavior of emerging working and middle classes and of the new civic entities—such as urban administrations, schools, and medical facilities—that accompanied industrialization. In detail, these new organizations were not equal in quality to those of France or Germany. Officials were less well trained. Corruption was more common. Bureaucratic self-interest intruded more frequently between an agency and the public it was meant to serve. Much is made in scholarly studies of these organizations of the potential arbitrary intervention of the monarchy and other members of elite society into their activities. In fact, this was a relatively rare occurrence. With advancing industrialization and the integration of the Russian state and economy into European orbits of power, the balance of authority between the monarch and the state bureaucracy was shifting in favor of the latter. In terms of their broad characteristics, the agencies of Russian state administration at the end of the nineteenth century were true bureaucracies in the Weberian sense of the word: hierarchical, legally bound, subdivided according to specialization, and defensive of officials' authority.

Following the Communist revolution of 1917, state intrusion into society became even more pervasive in Russia and, after 1945, in Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe. The vehicles for fresh state intervention were increased political centralization; the rapid development of state-controlled infrastructures such as mass education, medical, electrical, and transport systems; and especially centralized economic planning, pricing, and resource allocation. It seems unlikely, however, that the state organizations which governments created to manage these activities were Weberian bureaucracies. Owing to the arbitrary roles of political police, increasing corruption, gray and black market activities, and especially to the continuing intervention of Communist parties or their surrogates, Weberian prerequisites of legal norms of operation and professional independence of officials were often absent. It may be more reasonable to think of these organizations as systems of "dual supervision," as Reinhard Bendix would have it in Work and Authority in Industry (1956), since that term implies a system that cannot tolerate any degree of worker independence and attempts to avoid this by simultaneous managerial and ideological, or political, supervision. It is important to recognize, however, that arbitrary police and party roles were not universal in the Soviet and Communist bloc states and that there were administrative offices in higher education and scientific research, for example, that operated relatively independently and effectively.

The Weberian view that a circle of mutually reinforcing energies would continually expand bureaucracy in modern European society has been an important touchstone for policy debates and narratives of post-World War II bureaucratization. In the 1950s and 1960s economists such as John Kenneth Galbraith, Wassily Leontief, and Gunnar Myrdal seem confidently to have expected that state roles in planning and development were essential and certain to grow in all three major types of social system—advanced capitalist, communist, and developing. As early as the 1940s, however, proponents of "privatization," deinstitutionalization, and devolution of state functions such as transport, power generation, criminal incarceration, education, and even of poor relief called aspects of the bureaucratization narrative into question. Economists such as Friedrich von Hayek challenged the expectation that increases in the scale of enterprises (whether state or private) would offer proportionate increases in efficiency (economies of scale), lowering the cost of output. Moreover, changes in the cost and structure of many technologies—most notably, computers beginning in the 1970s—also made the decentralized operation of social and economic infrastructures and even policymaking feasible. In Industrial Constructions (1996), Gary Herrigel, for example, noted a symmetry in Germany between the "centralization and integration in the economy" on the one hand and state centralization on the other in the 1960s, as contrasted with the economic decentralization in the 1980s that stimulated a "similar reversal in state structure." It could certainly be argued, however, that the opposite has been true at the administrative level of the European Union in Brussels and Strasbourg. There, the last few decades of the twentieth century witnessed a nearly unprecedented expansion of oversight and regulatory administrations in economic, fiscal, educational, and cultural affairs, as well as in some areas of international relations.

Policy and technological change in the 1970s and 1980s also placed the bureaucracies of huge multinational and conglomerate corporations in the private sector under pressure. In the short run (during the 1980s and early 1990s, in particular) this resulted in some corporate "downsizing" and restructuring as well as in the divestiture of enterprises from state ownership. In the longer run, however, there appears to have been a renewed emphasis on bureaucratization in the private sector, taking the form not only of expanding firm size and scope but also of internationalization (or "globalization"). This trend has also increased the importance of organizations made up of other organizations, such as trade and professional associations that engage in political lobbying and negotiate or coordinate wage bargaining nationally or across industries, leading to what Torstendahl calls "corporative capitalism."

ADMINISTRATION WITHOUT BUREAUCRACY

While Weber tended to be preoccupied with state roles and their embeddedness into bureaucratic organizations, large nonstate organizations increasingly captured the attention of other writers. At the same time, these scholars also offered interpretations of organizational and official behavior that were at variance with Weber's views, emphasizing, for example, the unpredictability of participants' behavior in bureaucratic settings.

Roberto Michels, in Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (1915), studied large political associations representing lower-class interests in Germany. These organizations were created, in the teeth of much opposition, to represent the interests of laborers against large manufacturing organizations, such as the Krupp metal industries trust, and the political interest groups that supported them. Michels (with considerable critical assistance from Weber) concluded that in order to achieve their goals, these labor organizations adopted many of the bureaucratic characteristics of the huge firms with which they competed, obeying an "iron law of oligarchy." They became, that is, bureaucracies with authoritarian leaders in their own right in spite of organized labor's avowed antibureaucratic values. With the passage of time, internal requirements for the survival of working-class organizations conflicted with the workplace objectives of union members. This phenomenon, eventually known as goal displacement, is now recognized as common in formal organizations of all kinds.

DEVOLUTION AND DECENTRALIZATION: REVERSAL OF BUREAUCRATIZATION?

In his analysis of bureaucratization in the modern world, Max Weber thought that components of bureaucratic systems would interact so as to assure the continued expansion of bureaucratic systems. Beginning in the 1970s, research in political science, economics, and history has suggested that growth in the power and scope of authority of nation-states and firms in the contemporary world may not be inevitable. For example, Charles Sable and Jonathan Zeitlin published a pathbreaking article in 1985 that called attention to "exceptions" to the rule that successful enterprises always became mass producers and thus bigger, more dominant in their industries, and more bureaucratic. In 1987 the historian Paul Kennedy published a highly successful comparative history of several major European states in which he called attention to the factors accounting not only for their historic rise to power, wealth, and global influence but to their "fall" in the later twentieth century.

Decentralization and even breakup of a firm, an industry, or a state, however, do not necessarily lead to a reduction in bureaucracy. The sources of bureaucratization, as Weber noted, arise from the need, in modern society, for managerial and service organizations that are staffed by personnel in whom the public (or the organization's clients) have confidence or whom they regard as "legitimate." The foundations of such legitimacy seem to rest, in most cases, on demonstrations of expertise, detachment, and, above all, professional authority on the part of the organization's staff—the very components that Weber thought would stimulate bureaucratization.

Similarly, Frederick W. Taylor's detailed studies of the behavior of workers in large industrial and commercial settings indicated that, whatever the content of formal bureaucratic rules of behavior, workers often performed below levels of job output that might easily achieve in different circumstances. Universal, formal rules governing the behavior of employees or officials, that is, could be impediments to optimum performance. Taylor set about attempting to reconstruct job site conditions in ways that would enhance worker output and summarized his findings in The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). He focused attention on the microstructures of workplace behavior, in contrast to the attention that Weberian analysis paid to the macrostructures. Taylor's time-and-motion studies became famous as examples of strategies that were designed to affect performance in ways that went beyond the global rules and definitions to which Weber attached importance.

After 1910, Taylorism became one of the twentieth century's first management fads. Taylorism's influence became pervasive in some firms in North America and western Europe where management sought to improve workplace productivity without significant additional capital investment. In his attempt to reconstruct a state managerial system without all of the formalities and inefficiencies of the tsarist bureaucracy that leftist revolutionaries despised, the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin seized upon Taylorism as an administrative and organizational strategy that promised both efficiency and humane rationality in the workplace during the early years following the Russian Revolution of 1917. The politics of Russia's revolutionary transformation of administration ultimately overwhelmed Bolshevik ideals in this context.

In both of the preceding cases one sees examples of the abstract analyses and practical workplace strategies that the combination of rapidly developing organizations and critiques of Weberian theories would produce in the mid-twentieth century. These examples could be extended by illustrations, for instance, from the "human relations" school of industrial management. Taken together, these alternative, non-Weberian views of administration may be divided into several disciplinary or educational categories, three of which are administration theory, organization theory, and institutional theory.

Administration theory. State administration, as a special career, research, and educational track, long antedates Weberianism and bureaucratic studies and may be subsumed under the field of administration theory. There is still some controversy over whether the classic, centralized state administration in France was a product of the Napoleonic era or, as Alexis de Tocqueville asserted in The Old Regime and the French Revolution (1856), of the ancien régime. In any case, the notion that certain individuals could be prepared for a life of impartial and disinterested administration of organizations was common in many eighteenth-century European states, was central to Napoleonic reforms of state administration, and survived through the turn of the twenty-first century. For example, in France the grandes écôles e (such as the prerevolutionary Écôle des Ponts et Chausées or the Napoleonic Écôle Polytechnique) and, in Russia, the Tsarskoe Selo Lycée were meant to serve as training institutes for future elite state administrators. These institutions tended to focus on substantive administrative issues, as, indeed, do their heirs—schools of business and public administration—at the end of the twentieth century.

During the years following World War II, a period of rapid growth of large-scale administrations, research in public administration increased enormously. Work by Dwight Waldo (The Administrative State, 1984) and others, spanning two generations, produced theories of administration that attempted to distance themselves from Weber and from the history of bureaucracy. Increasingly, at the end of the twentieth century, public and business administration programs in both the European Union and North America—such as the Écôle Nationale d'Administration—relied on such disciplines as law, economics, organizational psychology, and accounting and derived much of their substantive focus not from theories of bureaucracy but from empirical case studies.

Organization theory. Organization theory and the detailed empirical study of individual and group behavior in complex organizations tend to be found within the disciplines of psychology, economics, and sociology. These offer, in many ways, a much more detailed understanding of administrative and organizational behavior than does bureaucratic research. Herbert A. Simon's Administrative Behavior: A Study of Decision-Making (1947), for example, stimulated a broad and rich body of empirical research into specific components of organizational behavior. Within this body of work, the Weberian perspective and the idea of organization as bureaucracy play only a limited role. For example, Chester Barnard (The Function of the Executive, 1938) and Fritz J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson (in Management and the Worker [1961], a celebrated study of social organization in one of the plants of the Western Electric Company) argued in the late 1930s that informal organizations, not meaningfully accounted for by Weberian typologies, always tended to arise within formal organizations. These were unplanned and undocumented structural relations among organization participants that were, in spite of their informality, essential for the operation of the formal organization. Such informal associations not only controlled the personal relations among participants but even effectively controlled what acceptable standards for job output would be. Analysis of the equilibrium between acceptable participant effort and organizational demands was extended by Simon, whose work won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and others. Of course, manipulation of such equilibria to achieve harmonious and cost-effective output is key to contemporary management and administrative science and has become a focal subject in schools of administration.

Institutional theory. A late twentieth-century addition to the corpus of work on large organizations, institutional theory attempts to identify social structures and behavior that render economic exchange less than optimal. As developed by the economist Douglass C. North (Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance, 1990), for example, this work is less interested in the institutions (or organizations) themselves than in their effect on economic performance. Nevertheless, institutional theory addresses the roles of both formal and informal organizations in society, comparatively and historically. Bureaucracy is of interest in institutional theoretical studies to the degree that it helps to explain institutional behavior. But an important underlying assumption seems to be that it is feasible to reconstruct social institutions—or to allow institutions to reconstruct themselves—in ways that limit, or even reverse, the organizational sclerosis that bureaucracy often implies.

SOCIAL AND OCCUPATIONAL MOBILITY ISSUES

The history of social mobility as it relates to bureaucracy in Europe is complex, owing not only to variations in the mobility opportunities for bureaucrats and candidates for bureaucratic appointments over time but also to important differences in the experience of individual countries. Moreover, as noted above, in the case of state bureaucracies one must keep in mind that, at certain points in time, while they may offer the means of upward mobility to individuals who gain official employment, their organizational responsibilities may well include constructing or controlling mobility opportunities for individuals throughout society. As educational administrators or fiscal agents, bureaucrats may well be responsible for shaping the career chances of virtually all future social elites, including their own future colleagues. While this may not mean that they control educational policy or even influence it consistently and significantly, there is ample evidence that bureaucratic elites act as "gatekeepers" who may control access to a vast array of career appointments in many societies. Work by authors such as John Armstrong and Ezra Suleiman, moreover, has shown that, at least until the 1950s and 1960s, this has meant that even very talented children of the lower classes in the democratic states of western Europe could be excluded systematically from elite administrative careers and even from the educational programs that might prepare them to compete for such careers.

This said, it remains a fact that large bureaucratic organizations, whether state or private, have long served as channels for upward social mobility in Europe. Among other factors, the increasing reliance of these organizations on impersonal rules of behavior and their growing need for expertise have enhanced the opportunities of individuals, such as the clerics in early modern western Europe, who may have possessed professional qualifications for elite administrative roles without having the upper-class social credentials that were traditionally associated with administrative power. As a result, beginning as early as the Renaissance, state civil service and certain branches of military service offered opportunities to the bright and ambitious sons of literate, impecunious commoners who had access to formal education, or at least technical training, throughout Europe. These opportunities, however, almost universally excluded the daughters of all social categories (except royal families, and occasionally the children of successful members of professions and of a few industrial magnates). They also denied access to all social categories beneath the relatively privileged, educated minority who should be regarded as a sort of social subelite. The exclusions applied, for example, not only to women but usually to Jews, and often (but not always) to other ethnic and religious minorities.

In western, central and most of eastern Europe, this structure of inclusions and exclusions would not change significantly until much later. That is, career opportunities in bureaucracies broadly, and in senior political or elite administration especially, would not be democratized, reflecting somewhat the social structure of entire societies, until the late twentieth century. In Scandinavia and western Europe women made inroads into institutions of higher and, more slowly, technical education. But usually these individuals were the children of social elites or, at least, of upper-middle-class professionals and the bourgeoisie. Moreover, these educational credentials reliably translated into administrative careers in only a few, relatively undervalued, fields such as lower education and general health care.

The history of career mobility in Russia and the other republics of the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution of 1917 was quite different from that of the rest of Europe. In Russia, to be sure, literacy, numeracy, and other results of education were so rare in the early twentieth century that even the most open bureaucratic employment policies could never have been democratic in the sense of reflecting the structure of the whole society. Nevertheless, as I note in Transition to Technocracy (1989), aggressive state and Communist Party programs aimed at restaffing and reconstructing the entire bureaucratic apparatus with candidates from the lower classes produced a massive turnover and relative democratization of Soviet officialdom in a period of time so brief that its effect has probably never been matched in European history. It is important to recognize, however, that this transformation within a decade, or perhaps fifteen years, was costly in terms of squandering administrative experience and denying both to civil administration and the bureaucracy of the new planned economy educational resources that were essential to their functioning. Forced by restaffing requirements, the rapid expansion of agencies, erratic police and Communist Party oversight, and politically inspired purges to reach ever deeper into the population reservoirs of the working class and peasantry, state administration in Russia suffered a degradation in intellectual resources beginning in the 1920s from which it did not recover until at least after World War II. Indeed, one can argue that the disarray and structural weakness that one finds in the state administrations of Russia and other former Soviet republics at the turn of the twenty-first century is partly owing to the continuing effects of this early destabilization.

Bureaucracy certainly shows no sign of significant retreat in Europe in the twenty-first century. If states are devolving and decentralizing in certain ways, they give no indication of being able to do without the rationality and structured authority that Weber found within modern bureaucracies. Moreover, as sophisticated technologies become ever more crucial to administrative operations in both the public and private spheres, the demand for independent, disinterested, legally protected experts organized into smoothly functioning career hierarchies seems certain to survive. In this critical sense, Weber's view that bureaucracy is a self-reinforcing social construct in modern society, together with his ability to identify the energies that give it life, was historically correct and analytically indispensable.

See alsoSecularization (volume 2);Social Mobility (volume 3).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Weber and about Weberian Bureaucracy

Armstrong, John A. The European Administrative Elite. Princeton, N.J., 1973.

Bendix, Reinhard. Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization. New York, 1956.

Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce. Translated by Siân Reynolds. Vol. 2 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. New York, 1981–1984.

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