Bureaucracy

1. Critical Appraisal of Max Weber’s Bureaucracy as a Philosophy of Management Today

Max Weber is the writer most often associated with the bureaucratic approach to organizations. Weber’s ideas of bureaucracy were a reaction to managerial abuses of power. He looked for methods to eliminate managerial inconsistencies that contributed to ineffectiveness, and his solution was a set of principles for organizing’ group effort through a bureaucratic organization. Although the term bureaucracy, has been popularized as a means of referring to organizations that “rule too rigidly by the book,” these principles are found in virtually every formal organization, today.

Max Weber proposed the development of ideal bureaucracy. Weber’s ideal bureaucracy was designed to eliminate inefficiency and waste in organizations. Many of the principles that he proposed many years ago are applied in the design of large organizations today. In fact, the term bureaucracy, that many consider similar to “red tape,” has a much broader and positive meaning because of Max Weber.

The basic principles of bureaucratic organization are:

1. A division of labor by functional specialization.

2.