With the US civil service under attack, it’s worth revisiting classical ideas about bureaucracy. Max Weber begins his hugely influential discussion (Weber 1922/1968) with this paragraph:

Experience tends universally to show that the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization—that is, the monocratic variety of bureaucracy—is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings. It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and in its reliability. It thus makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of the organization and for those acting in relation to it. It is finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its operations, and is formally capable of application to all kinds of administrative tasks (223).

Weber seems to have a kind of Darwinian model in mind. Given a soup of different kinds of organizational forms, the bureaucratic ones will prevail thanks to their superior efficiency. Socialism requires bureaucracy, and Weber even lists soviets (communist workers’ councils) as one of the bureaucracies of his time. He also interprets modern capitalism not as a system of market exchanges but as a space in which corporate bureaucracies grow. “Capitalism in its modern stages of development requires the bureaucracy” (p. 224). In fact, state agencies and corporations use convergent methods. Today, the same Microsoft Office tools can generate similar-looking Key Performance Indicators or org charts for a company, a nonprofit, or a state agency, because these organizations work very similarly.

If you asked people to associate words with “bureaucracy,” I doubt that many would suggest “efficiency.” Quite the contrary: words like “bloat” and “waste” would come to mind. Few would worry that we are trapped in a world in which bureaucracies metastasize because they are so efficient. Their spread would be treated as a sign of declining efficiency and would be blamed on the self-interest of the bureaucrats.

Was Weber right about the bureaucracy of Wilhelmine Germany but wrong to generalize, because bureaucracies tend to become inefficient? In that case, was he wrong to see their growth as inevitable? Or was he right about bureaucracies, and critics mistake bureaucratic systems as inefficient when they actually maximize outputs? Are many people undervaluing bureaucratic work as a calling, in Weber’s sense? Do people dislike the means that bureaucracies use, or resent their inevitable costs, or disagree about their ends? Are bureaucracies efficient for their own goals but not for the public good?

Source: Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 1922. The translation of this section is by Talcott Parsons (Bedminster Press, 1968). See also in defense of institutions as “garbage cans”; radical change needs institutional innovation; what to do about the guy behind the desk