Beetham - Bureaucracy

Beetham, David

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Series Editor: Frank Parkin Magdalen College, Oxford

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OPEN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Mi/ton Keynes

Open University Press

Open University Educational Enterprises Limited 12 Cofferidge Close Stony Stratford

Milton Keynes MK11 1BY, England

First published 1987

Copyright 1987 David Beetham

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form by mimeograph or by any other means, without premission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Beetham, David

Bureaucracy,(Concepts in the social sciences). 1. Bureaucracy 2. Sociology I. Title II. Series 302.3'5 JF1351

ISBN 0-335-15372-0 TT

Typeset by Quadra Associates Limited, Oxford

Printed by J, W. Arrowsmith Ltd., Bristol, England

Preface vii

Introduction 1

1 Models of Bureaucracy 9

Bureaucracy and administrative efficiency 11

The sociology of organization 11

Political economy 24

Public administration 33

Overview 43

Bureaucracy and policy formation 47

Conclusion 53

2 Theories of Bureaucratic Power 56

Weberian political sociology 57

The irreversible expansion of bureaucracy 58

The socialist illusion 62

The theory of leadership democracy 67

Marxist political economy 71

Capitalism and bureaucracy 72

Bureaucratic degeneration of the proletarian

revolution 80

Beyond bureaucracy 87

Conclusion 92

3 Bureaucracy and Democratic Theory 97

Democracy and administrative efficiency 103

Democracy and bureaucratic power 111

Conclusion 119

Further Reading 124

Bibliography 127

Index 134

Only someone who has rashly invited a computer to print out a complete list of titles on bureaucracy will be fully aware how much paper has been consumed in discussing the subject, rivalling in sheer volume even the output of bureaucracy itself. Why should any more be added to the pile? This books chief claim to distinction is that it is the shortest one to date on the subject. Where so much is written, and so few resources are available to purchase it, brevity must be the cardinal virtue, and cheapness the most powerful attraction. My debt to the vast literature will be obvious. More personal debts are due to my family and to that supreme practitioner of the arts of the bureau, Jeanne Bellovics.

David Beetham

'

Bureaucracy is something we all love to hate. It presents simultaneously the contradictory images of bungling inefficiency and threatening power. Incompetence, red tape and feather-bedding on the one side; manipulation, obstructionism and Byzantine intrigue on the other: there is almost no evil that has not at some point been debited to its account. Bureaucracy has the rare distinction of being anathematized across the political spectrum. The Right seeks to limit it in the name of the free market; the Centre to reform it in the name of openness and accountability; the Left to replace it in the name of participation and self-management. Yet it displays an impressive capacity to resist all such encroachments. The dictatorship of the official is on the advance, wrote Max Weber, bureaucracys most distinguished theoretician. This was, he argued, because of its unique capacity to handle the complex administrative tasks of a mass industrial society. Necessary, but persistently problematic: this is the paradox with which bureaucracy seems to confront us.

But what exactly is bureaucracy? The student whose interest is aroused by declamatory opening paragraphs like the above tends to be quickly thrown into a state of confusion as he or she penetrates deeper into the subject. The confusion arises from the many different meanings that have been assigned to the term bureaucracy, of which the following is by no means an exhaustive list: rule by officials, a system of professional administration, organizational inefficiency, public administration, a non-market institution, undemocratic organization. In the face of this variety of

usages, writers on bureaucracy tend to adopt one of two definitional strategies. The first is a prescriptive approach; they declare confidently that bureaucracy really means public administration, or organizational inefficiency, or whatever, as the case may be. This approach avoids confusion, but only so long as the student does not read anyone elses work. The second approach is a more descriptive and agnostic one, whereby the writer explores the very different meanings that have been given to the term, and concludes, perhaps regretfully, that there is really no such thing as bureaucracy at all: only a cluster of quite different phenomena, tenuously related to one another, to which a common name has misleadingly become attached. This approach certainly helps sort out the confusion, but only at the expense of dissolving bureaucracy as a unified subject of enquiry. At this point the student may feel a bit let down: does bureaucracy, then, not really exist after all?