Max Weber's Bureaucracy

1. Introduction

This report is focused on the investigation of Max Weber’s (1978) bureaucracy. Max Weber, one of the major individuals in the world of management thinking, was born in 1864 in Prussia (Weber, 1978). He is mostly famous for his sociological and economic studies, in which the researcher tries to understand the Western world and the unique way of its development (Weber, 2009). Weber’s studies and works have produced a significant impact on sociology and economics. It was Max Weber who studied the flow of information within an organisation and formulated the main principles of bureaucracy (Houghton, 2010). Max Weber lived and worked in the era of German expansionism, which had significantly influenced his studies (Greenwood and Lawrence, 2005).

2. Bureaucracy Management

According to Greenwood and Lawrence (2005), Weber believed that all organisations need to be managed impersonally on the basis of a specific set of rules. Weber (1978) was convinced that authority should be based on a person’s job and not on his/her personality. The main idea of the bureaucracy theory lies in the fact that authority should be passed from one individual to another as one of them left his/her job and another took it (Houghton, 2010; Law, 2011). Hence, bureaucracy can be defined as “management by the office or position rather than by a person or patrimonial” (Styhre and Lind, 2010, p. 109). It was believed by Weber that bureaucracy is the most effective and efficient form of any organisation since “the decisive reason for the advance of the bureaucratic organisation has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organisation” (Weber, 2009, p. 75). This superiority is achieved due to a well-defined line of authority and clear and strict rules (Styhre and Lind, 2010).

Weber (1978) believed that administrative functions represent a system of control that is based on knowledge. The researcher identified several common characteristics of a bureaucratic organisation. For instance, authority and responsibilities of each worker need to be clearly defined; officials should work for a fixed salary and they should not be elected, but rather appointed (Weber, 2009). In addition, officials and administrators should be the subject to strict rules and policies; relationships between managers and their subordinates need to be impersonal (Weber, 2009). Finally, any bureaucratic organisation was argued by Weber to maintain all files and documents regarding its activity (Weber, 1978).

3. Weber’s Bureaucracy and Quinn Competing Values

The competing value framework affirms the usefulness of several approaches to management, including internal maintenance, external positioning, flexibility and control (Boddy, 2009).