Max Weber's Theory Of Bureaucracy In Public Administration

Public administration is "centrally concerned with the organization of government policies and programmes as well as the behavior of officials formally responsible for their conduct" Many unelected public servants can be considered to be public administrators, including heads of city, county, regional, state and federal departments such as municipal budget directors, human resources administrators, city managers, census managers, state mental health directors, and cabinet secretaries. However, "until the mid-20th century and the dissemination of the German sociologist Max Weber 's theory of bureaucracy" there was not "much interest in a theory of public administration." The field is multidisciplinary in character; one of the various proposals

The German sociologist Max Weber argued that bureaucracy constitutes the most efficient and rational way in which one can organize human activity, and that systematic processes and organized hierarchies were necessary to maintain order, maximize efficiency and eliminate favouritism. Weber also saw unrestrained bureaucracy as a threat to individual freedom, in which an increase in the bureaucratization of human life can trap individuals in an "iron cage" of rule-based, rational control.

The structural features of bureaucracy
Bureaucracy has been central to public administration. It is because the characteristic of bureaucracy make it behave in predictable way
1) Specialized jurisdiction, office, task and division of labour and authority regarding the achievement of organization goal
2) Hierarchy of authority to coordinate the activities of the specialized office and to integrate their jurisdiction authority. In the most rational bureaucratic design, the organization is handle by single individual.
3) A career path
4) A bureaucratic structure tend to be permanent and remain intact regardless flow of the member in and out of it. Society become dependent on bureaucracy’s functioning to the extent that chaos result if it is

Dysfunction of bureauracy
Webers’s contruction is central to our understanding of formal organization structures. Hower , it is undeniable that some of the principle of bureaucracy is the most efficient means of organizing . On the contrary, the recent scholars have identified a number of weaknesses (dysfunction) of bureaucracy. Dysfunction may refers to social system which is detracting from adaptation and adjustment (cannot play function it intended to perform).
Some of the dysfunctions of bureaucracy are as follows:
1) Rules originally designed to serve organisational efficiently however they have a tendency to become all-important in their own right.
2) Relationship between office holder are based on the rights and duties of each roles, so they are depersonalized and this lead to rigid behaviour
3) Decision making tend to be programmed and this discourage the search for further alternatives .
4) The effects of rigid behaviour ofthen is very damaging for client and customer and also for management workers. Clients have to accept standardization.
5) Standardization and routine procedures makes changes and adaptation difficult when circumstances