German sociologist Max Weber was one of the first scholars to use the term and expand its influence. He described the concept in a positive sense and considered the ideal bureaucracy to be both efficient and rational. He believed that bureaucracy clearly defined the roles of the individuals involved and helped narrow the focus of administrative goals.
The term bureaucrat refers to someone who is a member of a bureaucracy. This can allude to someone who is a government official or someone in a position of power, such as a chief executive officer or board member of a company or another organization.
Bureaucracies can help organizations run smoothly and efficiently. This allows large organizations to streamline processes and bring order to systems and procedures.
Management becomes easier and processes become less chaotic. Bureaucracies tend to include a division of labor with clearly defined roles. They also ensure that everyone is treated equally and fairly, which means there is no bias toward any one entity. For instance, the government makes everyone fill out the same often cumbersome paperwork for benefits like student loans.
Bureaucracies are often looked down upon because people view them as valuing procedures over efficiency. Many people feel that rules and paperwork can pile up under bureaucracies.
This is often referred to as the red tape people and companies need to overcome in order to achieve certain goals like establishing a business. Rules and regulations can often be difficult to navigate and may even favor some people over others, such as the wealthy.
Some of the most common characteristics of a bureaucracy include a hierarchy, rules and regulations, and specialization. The hierarchy establishes scales of power—those with the most power are at the top while individuals who have the least fall at the bottom.
Rules and regulations are typically formal and indicate how processes and functions are to be conducted. Specialization entails the use of training to allow people to do their jobs properly under the structure. Bureaucracies are all around us from the companies for which we work to the governments that rule our world's countries.
They are in place to ensure that things run efficiently and by the book—that is, that people follow the rules, whether that's to conduct health and safety checks while on the job, to get a permit for a building project, or to access government benefits. As much as they're supposed to help keep everyone on track, bureaucracies are often criticized for being cumbersome and for putting the emphasis on procedure and policy rather than efficiency.
Regardless of how you feel about them—whether it's positive or negative—bureaucracies aren't going away. They are, in fact, a part of the structure of many organizations. Harvard Business Review. Federal Insurance Deposit Corporation. New World Encyclopedia. Wealth Management. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Investopedia. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page.
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Table of Contents Expand. What Is a Bureaucracy? How a Bureaucracy Works. Bureaucracy, Governance, Admin. Criticisms of a Bureaucracy. The most ominous form was government-sponsored health insurance, with its threat of intrusive federal bureaucracies. Bureaucracy and regulations were, and are, fundamentally a response to rising costs, growing complexity of activity, and a growing number of obligations to fulfil.
Because bureaucracies know more than their principals about the work they have been ' contracted' to do, information is asymmetrical. Providing patronage opportunities often comes at the expense of setting up professional bureaucracies and the efficient running of a program. The bits of bureaucracy that mattered were run by important princes or by commoners very close to the court. Delegation of authority to organisations outside the government bureaucracy will only be done when there is enough assurance that it will not create problems.
Gompers viewed the notion of industrial commissions as an effort by intellectuals to establish a bureaucracy that would oversee workers. These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors. Translations of bureaucracy in Chinese Traditional. See more.
Need a translator? Translator tool. What is the pronunciation of bureaucracy? Browse burdensome. Test your vocabulary with our fun image quizzes. Image credits. Word of the Day sweetheart. Blog Outsets and onsets! This could—according to the official line—improve public services, cut down on voter fraud, and reduce bureaucracy.
The culprit is bureaucracy —with its authoritarian power structures, suffocating rules, and toxic politicking.
That, says Vondracek, is why his experience is a lesson for countries battling with clunky bureaucracies but endowed with the power of a relatively savvy and tech-minded population. Senseless bureaucracy is part of what spawned the Tea Party.
Depressing is really what Cuba has become—repression, bureaucracy , and crippling poverty. He was widely perceived as having been outplayed by a vast military bureaucracy that he never sought to tame. They described the challenges of finding work and of dealing with the military bureaucracy. The sheer amount of redundant bureaucracy needs to be eliminated.
Almost the worst kind of government that can be placed upon a people is a bureaucracy. And in the same manner as in Prussia, a portion of the bureaucracy joined the bourgeoisie.
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