Max Weber and Bureaucracy

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             This essay explores the nature of Weber's bureaucracy and its influence on the PA discourse. It explains the reaction to Weber's concept of bureaucracy and its combustion with capitalist and democratic values. In addition, the essay reflects the rational and irrational areas that can be traced in the literature of public organizations and public administration theories. It concludes by presenting an objective view of bureaucracy and its implementing implications in a democratic society like the United States.
             Rationality of Weber's Bureaucracy:.
             Weber defines bureaucracy as "the means of carrying community action over into rationally ordered social action an instrument for socializing relations of power, bureaucracy has been and is a power instrument of the first order." Some scholars (Friedrich, 1940; Finer, 1941; Simon, 1947; Shafritz and Hyde,1997; and Marshall in Ventriss, 2000) argue that public administration is a field of control; control of public administrators, control of people, control of inputs, and control of outputs. All these kinds of controls seek to achieve one main goal which is to meet the people's needs and expectations in an efficient way. According to Weber (1946), bureaucracy "is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally that most rational known means of carrying out imperative control over human beings" (337). .
             Weber argues that human civilization evolved from primitive and mystical to the rational and complex stages and relationships. Weber believes that societies move from the primitive stage to theoretical and technical ones. According to Weber, the evolution of societies is facilitated by three types of authority that he identifies as traditional, charismatic and legal-rational authority (Fry, 1989). It is the legal-rational type of authority that constitutes the basis of Weber's concept of bureaucracy and the foundation of modern civilization as it is premised on "a belief in the legitimacy of the pattern of normative rules and the rights of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands" (Stillman, 2000, 51).