Bureaucratic Theory

What Bureaucratic Theory is

Bureaucratic Theory (النظرية البيروقراطية), also called Weber’s Theory of Bureaucracy, is a description by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864 to 1920) of a pattern of administrative organisation in which authority rests on written, impersonal rules, work is divided among offices with a defined jurisdiction, those offices are filled by staff chosen for their qualifications, and superiors are ranked in a declared hierarchy. This is our wording of what secondary summaries report. The Arabic title is our choice of rendering, and the concept is also found in Arabic writing as «النموذج البيروقراطي» or «بيروقراطية فيبر».

In the theory, the word names an organisational pattern under study and carries no reproach. It is therefore different from “bureaucracy” in everyday speech, where it means slow procedures and piles of paperwork. The definition is not a judgement that this pattern is better than others, nor a description of any administrative apparatus that exists in Saudi Arabia.

Which sources did we check?

We verified in Crossref the bibliographic data of every journal article we cite; Crossref confirms that an article exists and gives its details but says nothing about its content. We dropped hyphens from the English titles.

• Weber. The book “Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft”, published after his death through the efforts of his wife Marianne Weber. Secondary summaries date it to 1921 or 1922, and according to the same summaries its complete English translation, “Economy and Society”, appeared in 1968. We did not verify its details in Crossref or in a library catalogue, so we treat them as unverified, and we did not see its text.
• Merton. The article “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality” in Social Forces, volume 18, issue 4, 1940, pages 560 to 568, identifier 10.2307/2570634.
• Udy. The article “‘Bureaucracy’ and ‘Rationality’ in Weber’s Organization Theory: An Empirical Study” in American Sociological Review, volume 24, issue 6, 1959, starting on page 791 according to Crossref, identifier 10.2307/2088566.
• Hall. The article “The Concept of Bureaucracy: An Empirical Assessment” in American Journal of Sociology, volume 69, issue 1, 1963, pages 32 to 40, identifier 10.1086/223508.
• Adler and Borys. The article “Two Types of Bureaucracy: Enabling and Coercive” in Administrative Science Quarterly, volume 41, issue 1, 1996, starting on page 61 according to Crossref, identifier 10.2307/2393986.
• Evans and Rauch. The article “Bureaucracy and Growth: A Cross National Analysis of the Effects of ‘Weberian’ State Structures on Economic Growth” in American Sociological Review, volume 64, issue 5, 1999, starting on page 748 according to Crossref, identifier 10.2307/2657374.
• Olsen. The article “Maybe It Is Time to Rediscover Bureaucracy” in Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, volume 16, issue 1, pages 1 to 24, which Crossref records as issued in 2005, identifier 10.1093/jopart/mui027.

We read the abstracts of Hall, of Adler and Borys, and of Olsen as OpenAlex displays them, and we read the text of none of these articles. OpenAlex holds no abstract for Merton’s article or for the one by Evans and Rauch. The abstract it records for Udy’s article deals with alienation and does not match the title, so we did not rely on it, and for these three articles we go no further than their titles.

Our account of the model itself comes from the English Wikipedia articles on bureaucracy, on types of authority and on the ideal type, which are secondary sources. We did not read Weber’s text, and the features of the model we give are taken from secondary sources that differ in how many they list and how they word them.

What are the features of Weber’s model?

Secondary summaries list the features of bureaucracy in Weber’s model in terms close to these, with differences between sources in their number, order and wording:

• Hierarchy: Superiors and subordinates in formal, declared lines of authority, with each level supervising the one beneath it.
• Defined jurisdiction: Each office has a fixed area of work, with a strict division of labour between offices.
• Written rules: Decisions and powers are set by rules and bound by them, rather than left to the judgement of the officeholder case by case.
• Impersonality: Cases are handled according to the rule, not according to the relationship between the person concerned and the official.
• Appointment by qualification: Staff are selected for their training and technical expertise and advance along a career path according to their qualifications, which are assessed by the organisation’s rules and not by individual discretion.
• Regularity: The work assigned to each office is carried out regularly and continuously.

The summaries report that Weber regarded this pattern as the most efficient and rational way of organising human activity, and that he saw it at the same time as a threat to individual freedom, describing what he feared from it with the image of the “iron cage”. On the account those sources give, Weber’s model describes both the strength of the pattern and its price, and it does not advocate it.

What does “ideal type” mean in Bureaucratic Theory?

Weber describes bureaucracy through what he calls an “ideal type” (Idealtypus in German). The word does not mean the best or the most desirable. According to the summaries, it means an abstract concept that a researcher builds by gathering the features of a pattern in their pure form, as a benchmark against which real cases are compared to see where they depart from it. The model is a tool of comparison.

That has a practical consequence for interpretation. To call an organisation “bureaucratic” in the Weberian sense describes how close it comes to the model on a particular feature, and passes no verdict on whether it is good or bad. This understanding is our inference from the meaning of the ideal type in the summaries, not a quotation from Weber’s text.

For the same reason, and according to the summaries, the ideal type is a measuring tool and not a picture of any one organisation, and no organisation is expected to match it in every feature.

How does Bureaucratic Theory relate to Weber’s types of authority?

The summaries report that Weber distinguished three ideal types of legitimate authority. Charismatic authority rests on personal qualities in the leader, traditional authority rests on custom and inheritance, and rational legal authority rests on established rules. The summaries place bureaucracy in the last of these: it is the administrative apparatus through which rational legal authority operates.

The summaries add that these types are themselves ideal types and rarely appear in pure form. Obedience in a real organisation may therefore combine respect for the rule with loyalty to the person of the founder and attachment to an old custom. That is our estimate, which we do not attribute to a source.

Bureaucratic Theory and the everyday sense of bureaucracy

The Wikipedia article on bureaucracy reports that the word appeared in French in the middle of the 18th century in a critical context, and that it is used in politics and in workplaces with a disparaging tone for rules and procedures that seem to stand in the way of getting things done. It adds that Weber widened its meaning in the 1920s to cover any administration run by trained specialists under fixed rules. The two senses share a word and differ in subject: the first names an organisational pattern under study, and the second passes judgement on a bad experience with procedures.

Telling the two apart is a practical matter, not a verbal one. Measuring how many written rules a particular organisation has is studied under the name Formalization, where every written rule is put to one question: does it change a decision? In our reading, a rule that changes no decision is closer to the everyday sense of the word, while a rule that prevents one person from being treated differently from others is closer to the impersonality feature of Weber’s model.

How does the theory differ from related concepts?

• Fayol’s principles: Henri Fayol wrote from the position of an engineer and manager, so his list came out as guidance for people who manage, whereas Weber wrote as a sociologist describing and analysing a pattern. Readers who want to compare the model with a list from the same period can turn to Fayol’s Principles of Management, where division of work, centralisation and the scalar chain appear among fourteen principles.
• Scientific management: The subject of the model differs from that of the school known as Scientific Management, attributed to Frederick Taylor. That school studies how a task is performed through observation and measurement, while the model describes the structure of authority and offices across the whole administrative apparatus. This distinction between the two subjects is our formulation.
• Machine and professional bureaucracy: Two of the five configurations in the classification set out in Mintzberg Organisational Configurations carry the name bureaucracy, namely the machine bureaucracy and the professional bureaucracy. We do not take the shared name as evidence of a link to Weber that we have not verified in the sources.
• Job specialisation: The defined jurisdiction of each office in the model comes close to a design decision discussed under the heading Job Specialization, meaning the narrowing of an employee’s work to a limited set of repeated tasks. There is a difference as we see it: the model fixes the scope of an office’s authority, and specialisation fixes the breadth of its tasks.
• Unity of command: The formal lines of authority in the model are close to a question raised by the principle of Unity of Command, about how many people give an employee orders on a single task. That principle comes from Fayol’s list and not from Weber’s model.

What did reviewers and critics say?

According to the abstract of Hall (1963), he treated the concept of bureaucracy as a series of dimensions, each of them a continuum, and when he measured these dimensions he found that they did not vary together. He suggests that the concept is more accurate empirically when treated this way, rather than assuming that organisations are either wholly bureaucratic or not bureaucratic at all, and he applied his model to ten organisations. As we understand it, this means one organisation can rank high on one dimension and low on another.

The abstract of Adler and Borys (1996) reports that the article proposes a conception of workflow formalisation that reconciles two opposing assessments of bureaucracy: that it alienates employees, or that it enables them to do their tasks better. The authors distinguish “enabling” formalisation from “coercive” formalisation. They argue that the effect of formalisation on employee attitudes is positive or negative depending on whether it helps employees master their tasks or is used by management as a means of extracting effort and compliance. That is the authors’ argument as the abstract words it, and the abstract reports no measurement supporting it.

Olsen’s abstract (2005) questions the popular idea that bureaucratic organisation is an outdated and undesirable administrative form and that a shift to market or network organisation is inevitable. It argues that bureaucratic organisation is part of a repertoire of overlapping and competing forms that coexist in contemporary democracies, and that rediscovering Weber’s analysis enriches the understanding of public administration.

We read neither the abstract nor the text of Merton (1940), so we attribute no finding to it. Its title points to a link between bureaucratic structure and the personality of those who work within it. The title of Udy (1959) brings together “bureaucracy” and “rationality” in Weber’s theory and presents the article as an empirical study, and the title of Evans and Rauch (1999) points to a cross national analysis of the effects of “Weberian” state structures on economic growth. We do not know what either of them found, so all we take from them is that the model became a subject of measurement in sociology and in the study of state apparatuses.

Two of these articles, by Evans and Rauch and by Olsen, concern state structures and public administration rather than the individual organisation, although secondary summaries report that the model covers public and private administration alike. The sources we reviewed also leave the model’s effect unsettled: the Adler and Borys abstract makes the effect of formalisation on employees depend on its type, so we attribute no fixed effect on performance or satisfaction to the model.

A worked hypothetical example: assessing an organisation on four dimensions

Suppose an organisation with 48 employees whose management wanted to know how close it comes to the features of the model. It chose four dimensions and measured each one with a separate percentage. The idea of measuring with separate dimensions is drawn from Hall’s abstract, while we devised the dimensions and their measures ourselves:

• Written rules: Of 24 recurring procedures in the organisation, 18 had a written rule, which is 18 ÷ 24 = 75%.
• Appointment by qualification: Of 15 appointments in the year, written criteria were recorded before the interviews in 9, which is 9 ÷ 15 = 60%.
• Recorded decisions: Of 40 administrative decisions in a sample of the year’s files, 30 were kept in writing together with their reasons, which is 30 ÷ 40 = 75%.
• Line of authority: Of the 48 employees, 44 had a single recorded direct manager, which is 44 ÷ 48 = 91.7% approximately.

The percentages add up to 75 + 60 + 75 + 91.7 = 301.7, and their average is 301.7 ÷ 4 = 75.4% approximately. The average hides the gap between the highest dimension and the lowest, which is 91.7 minus 60, or 31.7 points. The four percentages also have different denominators, so the average is a descriptive figure and not a share of a single total. In our view the dimensions are better examined separately, along the lines Hall’s abstract suggests.

Management then wrote criteria for every future appointment. If 5 more appointments are made with written criteria, the second dimension becomes (9 + 5) ÷ (15 + 5) = 14 ÷ 20 = 70%. The organisation and the figures are hypothetical, set out to show the method of calculation. They do not represent any organisation or study, and they do not imply that a higher percentage is better. A rising share of written rules does not reveal whether those rules help employees or constrain them, which is the question the Adler and Borys abstract raises.

Common misreadings of Bureaucratic Theory

• Taking it as a call for red tape: The model describes a pattern, and according to the summaries Weber himself saw in it a threat to individual freedom.
• Confusing the scholarly sense with the everyday one: Calling an organisation bureaucratic in the Weberian sense does not mean that it is slow or complicated.
• Taking “ideal” to mean the best: In the theory, the word refers to the pure form used as a benchmark for comparison.

What is the role of HR?

The theory touches HR work at more than one point. Appointment by qualification connects with selection criteria; career paths and promotion by qualification connect with promotion policies; and written rules and impersonality connect with treating employees by one standard. These connections are our own and do not come from a source. We think what HR gains from the model is a list of questions rather than a recipe. Are the appointment criteria written down before the interview? Does a rule help employees do their work, or is it used solely to control them? Who has the power to change a rule once it turns out to change no decision?

What does the evidence allow us to say?

We do not say that adopting the model raises efficiency or improves discipline in an organisation, nor that departing from it does harm. All we have are abstracts of some of the articles, titles of others, and secondary sources on a book whose text we did not read. We attribute no effect to any source beyond what we reported from its abstract, under that source’s name.

Crossref lists works on the government administrative apparatus in Saudi Arabia, among them a chapter by Al Awaji titled “Bureaucracy and Development in Saudi Arabia: The Case of Local Administration”, from 1989. We read none of them, and in the sources we reviewed we found no Saudi study we could rely on that examines the model in private organisations.

In our view, the model is better treated as a tool for examining an organisation than as a standard for judging it: each of its features is looked at separately, and every written rule is asked what it protects and what it costs. What is decided after that differs with the size of the organisation and the nature of its work.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.