analysis the process of bureaucratization in the modern world
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The term “bureaucracy” is of recent origin. Initially referring to a cloth covering the desks of French government officials in the eighteenth century, the term “bureau” came to be linked with a suffix signifying rule of government (as in “aristocracy” or “democracy”), probably during the struggles against absolutism preceding the French Revolution. During the nineteenth century the pejorative use of the term spread to many European countries, where liberal critics of absolutist regimes typically employed it to decry the tortuous procedures, narrow outlook, and highhanded manner of autocratic government officials (Heinzen 1845). Since then this pejorative meaning has become general in the sense that any critic of complicated organizations that fail to allocate responsibility clearly, or any critic of rigid rules and routines that are applied with little consideration of the specific case, of blundering officials, of slow operation and buck-passing, of conflicting directives and duplication of effort, of empire building, and of concentration of control in the hands of a few will use this term regardless of party or political persuasion (Watson 1945). During the years following World War ii this common stereotype was given a new twist by the witty, mock-scientific formulations of Parkinson’s Law, which derided empire building, waste of resources, and inertia by implying that official staffs expand in inverse pro-portion to the work to be done (Parkinson 1957).
This popular, pejorative usage must be distinguished from “bureaucracy” used in a technical sense. Although the distinction is beset with difficulties, social scientists have employed the term because it points to the special, modern variant of age-old problems of administration, just as terms like “ideology” and “class” point to modern aspects of intellectual life and social stratification. The analytic task is to conceptualize this modern variant. At the macroscopic level, Max Weber’s definition of bureaucracy under the rule of law provides the best available solution to this problem; none of the critics of Weber’s analysis has as yet dispensed with his definition. According to Weber, a bureaucracy establishes a relation between legally instated authorities and their subordinate officials which is characterized by defined rights and duties, prescribed in written regulations; authority relations between positions, which are ordered systematically; appointment and promotion based on contractual agreements and regulated accordingly; technical training or experience as a formal condition of employment; fixed monetary salaries; a strict separation of office and incumbent in the sense that the official does not own the “means of administration” and cannot appropriate the position; and administrative work as a full-time occupation.
A government administration so defined must be understood, according to Weber, as part of a legal order that is sustained by a common belief in its legitimacy. That order is reflected in written regulations, such as enacted laws, administrative rules, court precedents, etc., which govern the employment of officials and guide their administrative behavior. Such authoritative ordering of the bureaucracy is never more than a proximate achievement; written regulations are often “out of step” with the conditions to which they refer, while codifications and legal and administrative reforms, although designed to cope with that problem, are subject to interpretation. The legal order remains intact as long as such difficulties are resolved through further elaboration of existing regulations and, in relation to the bureaucracy, as long as administrative behavior is oriented toward a system of regulations. In sum, these ideal types of administration and the rule of law are the more fully realized “the more completely [they] succeed in achieving the exclusion of love, hatred, and every purely personal, especially irrational and incalculable, feeling from the execution of official tasks”.
A word is needed concerning the difficulties of these formulations. Weber himself always emphasized that an ideal type simplifies and exaggerates the empirical evidence in the interest of conceptual clarity. No actual government administration is bureaucratic in the strict sense of his definition; this follows from the simplifications needed to arrive at an ideal type. Concrete instances will, there-fore, lack one or several of the constituent elements or possess them in varying degrees; thus Weber speaks of mixed types like “patrimonial bureaucracy” when referring to specific examples. This approach involves methodological problems still under discussion. However, for present purposes it is sufficient to distinguish among and to discuss three possible uses of Weber’s definition: as a historical bench mark (modern bureaucracy); as a syndrome of social change (bureaucratization); and as a specification of the problems of bureaucracy in the modern nation-state.
The process of bureaucratization in the modern world are mentioned below :
- During the 18th century the process of rule implementation by the government came in the synchronization by the term ' agency ' .
- During the 19th century there was huge widespread of this term in the European societies.
- Social researchers generally use this term in today's generation as it's exceptional and has a significant information about the social issues.