Bureacracy

By: Murtuza Imani(9)

• Bureaucracy is the collective organizational structure,
procedures, protocols, and set of regulations in place to
manage activity, usually in large organizations and
government
• Bureaucracy is the the administrative arm of the
Government
• Technically a branch of the executive, but legislature
also has some control over its functioning
• In the Indian democracy setup, its responsibility is to turn
legislation into policies and act as intermediary between
representatives and society.  It has a wide range of
duties, from formulating and planning difficult technical
issues to handing out welfare checks, delivering the mail,
etc.
• Four structural concepts central to any definition
of bureaucracy:
– a well-defined division of administrative labour among
persons and offices,
– a personnel system with consistent patterns of
recruitment and stable linear careers,
– a hierarchy among offices, such that the authority and
status are differentially distributed among actors, and
– formal and informal networks that connect
organizational actors to one another through flows of
information and patterns of cooperation.
Types of Bureaucratic Agencies
• Production organizations – e.g. Social Security
Administration, Indian Postal Service- both
outputs and outcomes are observable
• Procedural organizations – e.g. Occupational
Safety and Health Administration- outputs are
easily observable
• Craft organizations – e.g. Indian Department of
Labor- outcomes are easily observable
• Coping organizations – e.g. Police
Departments- neither outputs nor outcomes are
observable
 Role of Bureacracy
• it provides the possibility for government to function
effectively and efficiently
• Standardization of procedures creates the ability to
easily pass knowledge to future workers as well as
facilitating better communication among colleagues.
• Division of labor creates economies of scale within
organizations, enhancing productivity.
• Formal hierarchy can also increase efficiency, as there is
a clear chain of command eliminating the potential for
some conflicts.
• Impersonal relationships also lead to easier dismissal of
workers, which contributes to greater efficiency
• It creates order
 Disadvantages
• Vertical hierarchy of authority can became chaotic,
• Competences can be unclear and used contrary to the
spirit of the law; Nepotism, corruption, political infighting,
and other degenerations can counter the rule of
impersonality and can create a recruitment and promotion
system not based on merit,
• Officials can try to avoid responsibility and seek anonymity
by avoiding documentation of their procedures (or creating
extreme amounts of chaotic, confusing documents)
• Overspecialization, making individual officials not aware of
larger consequences of their actions;
• Rigidity and inertia of procedures, making decision-making
slow or even impossible when facing an unusual case,;
• The phenomenon of "group thinking": zealotry, loyalty, and
lack of critical thinking regarding the organization which is
viewed as "perfect" and "always correct" by definition,
making it unable to change and realize its own mistakes and
limitations;
• Disregard for dissenting opinions, even when such views
suit the available data better than the opinion of the majority;
• The Catch-22 phenomenon as bureaucracy creates more
and more rules and procedures, their complexity raises and
coordination diminishes, facilitating the creation of
contradictory rules
• bureaucracy can lead to the treatment of individual human
beings as impersonal objects
• Red tapism and corruption