Perrow's Defense Of Bureaucracy

Using the ideas of Perrow and his defense of bureaucracy, the way some professors construct their courses for undergraduate students are examples of what bureaucracy is good for. Take AFAS-371 for example (Hip-Hop Cinema); this course has an integrated, centralized and mechanistic bureaucratic structure. AFAS-371 is an example for what bureaucracy is good for because there are uniform/well defined tasks and goals (limiting particularism), a small top-down centralized hierarchy allowing for easy communication between - Graders, Teaching Assistance and the Professor, and the rules/procedures are laid out in a clear and easy to learn manner which limits mistakes and slow decision making. Having 1,200 students in one course is no easy task to manage,

Following Weber’s bureaucratic model, the Graders are assigned a Teaching Assistant who in turn provides the grader with the section and a handful of groups to oversee for the rest of the semester. Having these narrowly defined work parameters allows each governing body and front-line worker to know what their tasks are and what their job requires. For the remainder of the semester the Graders score the students in their assigned groups and assist in any questions those assigned students have. If a student asks a question that the grader may not know, they can ask their Teaching Assistant who manages the section and Grader. Then if it’s a mater too important then the teaching assistant can easily contact the professor. This allows for a fluid structure that allows for easily defined rules/procedures, quick communication both up and down the hierarchal ladder, and limits self-interests because there is no reward or payoff with perusing other appeals; students, and workers are randomly assigned sections and groups, thus limiting the possibility of favoritism and benefiting undergraduate friends. However, bureaucracy is not good for

First, bureaucracy is not always good for efficiency. For example, within federal agencies and programs such as recruiting, often there is a lot of “red tape” (rules and regulations) that can severely slow down processes. Another example of what bureaucracy is not good for is the principal-agent problem (Edwards, 2015). At a recreation center in my home town, there was a matrix for the hierarchal ladder, it was tall and wide. None of the front-line workers that dealt with the patrons knew who their supervisor was, only their team leader. However, the managers within the recreation center would create policies that would contradict what was actually need, such as not allowing teens in the Game Room without their parents, and inputting to gaming systems with outdated games. Most of the managers, did not know how to setup a gaming console, yet they would make the decisions of what games to get and which systems to replace without consulting the front-line workers. Thus, the decisions made for particular issues were without consultation or input from the agents working the game room and who know the needs of the recreation center. There are ways however, that managers can enhance an organization’s