Bureaucracy

A Bureaucracy is a Government worker population composed of bureaucrats.

• Context:
  • It can range from being an International Bureaucracy to being a National Bureaucracy to being a State/Provincial Bureaucracy to being a Local Government Bureaucracy.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • an Elected Body (of elected officials).
• See: Government Administration, Management Theory.

---

---

References

2016

• (Wikipedia, 2016) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/bureaucracy Retrieved:2016-9-1.
  • A bureaucracy is "a body of non-elective government officials" and/or "an administrative policy-making group". Historically, bureaucracy was government administration managed by departments staffed with non-elected officials. Today, bureaucracy is the administrative system governing any large institution. Since being coined, the word "bureaucracy" has developed negative connotations. Bureaucracies have been criticized as being too complex, inefficient, or too inflexible. The dehumanizing effects of excessive bureaucracy became a major theme in the work of Franz Kafka, and were central to his novels, The Castle and The Trial. The elimination of unnecessary bureaucracy is a key concept in modern managerial theory and has been an issue in some political campaigns.

    Others have noted the necessity of bureaucracies in modern life. 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 favoritism. Weber also saw unfettered bureaucracy as a threat to individual freedom, in which an increase in the bureaucratization of human life can trap individuals in an impersonal "iron cage" of rule-based, rational control.

---