Max Weber and bureaucracy
Max Weber was the German sociologist born in 1864, in Prussia. He prescribed many ideal-typical forms of public administration, government and business in his 1922 work ‘Economy and Society’. A bureaucracy is "a body of non-elective government officials" and/or "an administrative policy-making group.
According to Waver bureaucracy refers to the management of large organizations characterized by hierarchy, fixed rules, impersonal relationships, rigid adherence to procedures, and a highly specialized division of labor.
Weber suggests the characteristics of bureaucracy as following[i] :
1. There is the principle of fixed official jurisdictional areas, which are generally ordered by rules, that is, by laws or administrative regulations.
2. The principles of office hierarchy and of levels of grade authority mean a firmly ordered system of super and subordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by the higher ones.
3. The management of modern offices is based upon written documents (“the files”), which are preserved in their original or draught form.
4. Office management, at least all specialized office management – and such management is distinctly modern – usually presupposes thorough and expert training.
5. When the office is fully developed, official activity demands the full working capacity of the official, irrespective of the fact that his obligatory time in the bureau may be firmly delimited.
6- The management of the office follows general rules which are more or less stable, more or less exhaustive, and which can be learned.
Chester Bernard
He
was born in 1886. He worked as Chief
Executive Officer of New Jersey Bell Telephone.
He is authoring ‘Functions of the Executive’, an influential 20th
century management book, in which Barnard presented a theory of organization
and the functions of executives in organizations. He has developed 2 concepts
in Management Theory.
First concept is strategic planning: it is the formulation of major plan or strategies to pursuit of major objectives. And he prescribed three top functions of management. They are: (i) establish and maintain an effective communication system, (2) hire the experienced and suitable personnel, (3) motivate those personnel.
The second concept is acceptance theory of authority: Managers have more authority than employees. It suggested that authority flows downward but depends on acceptance by the subordinate. It depends on 4 conditions: (1) employees can and do understand the communication (2) employees must be able to follow any instruction given by a Manager, (3) employees must think that the directive is in keeping with organizational objectives, (4) employees must think that the directive is not contrary to their personal goals.
Chester Bernard argued that organization that do not care efficiency and effectiveness have short life. He further assessed that except churches there are very few organizations that lived more than a century.
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