Bureaucrat
Bureaucrat
The term bureaucrat refers to a professional administrator, a career official employed to serve a bureau or office. Often used pejoratively, the term describes a predominantly stabilizing function in which the career interests of the administrator align with the bureau’s norms and values.
The German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) embedded in his classic analysis of bureaucracy in Economy and Society (originally published in 1925 and translated in 1958) a section on the position of the official whose activities are fixed and ordered by rules, so that authority will be seen to derive from a rational and impersonal basis. For Weber, the bureaucrat is simply intrinsic to this process of rationalization that so typifies modernity. Such an official would have been expected to possess certain qualifications in order to occupy the position in the first place, presumably as a result of rigorous training in management generally and in the rules of the bureau. At all times, official activities are supervised by a higher authority within the organization; nevertheless, the official owes loyalty not to the supervisor, but to the bureau and its purpose. A bureaucrat assumes appointment to the office by accepting “a specific obligation of faithful management in return for a secure existence” (Weber 1958, p. 199). As a result, the official is meant to enjoy a status commensurate with rank. An official’s expertise and authority will tend to protect the officeholder from “arbitrary dismissal or transfer” (Weber 1958, p. 202). Weber held that for the sake of stable employment the bureaucrat will accept a lower salary compared to the private sector, although presently bureaucrats appear in every sector, including the private sector—to the consternation of critics. One critic, James Burnham, famously warned in 1941 against their domination as a class.
According to the economist Ludwig von Mises in Bureaucracy (1944), allegiance to the bureau and relative insulation from “arbitrary dismissal or transfer” contributes to the perception that bureaucrats tend to be unresponsive to external complaint. The primary reason is that there exists no way to calculate the bureaucrat’s performance, except of the extent to which he or she adheres to the prescribed rules and stays within budget.
Bureaucrats stabilize the office in part because they learn not to take risks. Ralph Hummel explains in The Bureaucratic Experience that the supervisor assumes the role of conscience and ego function, deciding what needs to be done and how, and leaving it to the bureaucrat to fulfill the explicit terms of the employment contract. Any other than instrumental rationality is not required. Mises spoke for many critics when he argued that bureaucracy “kills ambition, destroys initiative and the incentive to do more than the minimum required” (Mises 1983, p. 61). Rather than undertake risk, a prudent bureaucrat will not only conform but also take steps to secure the future by protecting the bureau from threat of dissolution. For this reason, whatever the originating and legitimating purpose had been for the creation of the bureau, the bureaucrat owes a primary allegiance to the perpetuation of the bureau itself. Keeping a job becomes more important than doing the job, which is goal displacement. For example, in 1978 the communist Rudolf Bahro identified bureaucrats in socialist states as jealous and exploitative rulers, responsible for alienated consciousness and preventing further liberation.
The virtue of bureaucrats, according to Gareth Morgan (1986), lies in professionalism based on expertise, concentration, a relatively transparent mission, and the impersonal nature of workplace relationships—all of which fulfilled the ambition of rational administration consistent with a mechanistic model of organizations, in contrast to prior models based for example on kinship, personal loyalty, or profit seeking.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bahro, Rudolph. 1978. The Alternative in Eastern Europe. London: New Left Books.
Burnham, James. 1960. The Managerial Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (Orig. pub. 1941).
Hummel, Ralph. 1994. The Bureaucratic Experience: A Critique of Life in the Modern Organization. 4th ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Mises, Ludwig von. 1983. Bureaucracy. Grove City, PA: Libertarian Press. (Orig. pub. 1944).
Morgan, Gareth. 1986. Images of Organization. New York: Sage.
Weber, Max. 1958. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Trans. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press. (Orig. pub. 1922).
Nathan W. Harter