Bureaucratic and Normative Control Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Bureaucratic and Normative Control - Essay ExampleActually hierarchy in general (in the smell out of levels of authority) is to be found in any administration which has a certain degree of magnitude and complexity. The feudal subject of administration had a complicated hierarchical system. (Davis, 1994, p73) There is hierarchy of a companionable rank corresponding to the hierarchy of fiefs through the process of sub-infatuation... 6 But the difference between the two kinds of hierarchies, according to Weber, is to be found in the type of authority relations. In the feudal case the relationship between inferior and superior is personal and the legitimating of authority is based on a belief in the sacredness of tradition. In a bureaucracy, authority is legitimised by a belief in the correctness of the rules and the loyalty of the bureaucrat is oriented to an impersonal order, to a superior position, non to the person who holds it. So what makes an administration more or less bureau cratic from the hierarchical point of view is not the number of levels of authority, or the size of the gallus of control the decisive criterion is whether or not the authority relations have a precise and impersonal character, as a result of the ornateness of rational rules.Concerning first the criterion of meaningful adequacy, it does not necessarily make sense to someone that a type of organisation having the Weberian characteristics to an extreme degree should compensate maximum efficiency. One could equally well imagine such an organisation as being extremely inefficient. For example, some of these characteristics, even from a common sense point of view, seem to promote administrative inefficiency rather than efficiency (e.g. promotion by seniority). As to the criterion of objective possibility, in the light of the empirical explore done since Weber, one can argue that a perfectly rational-efficient organisation having Webers ideal characteristics is not objectively possibl e, in the sense that it runs against the known laws of nature -- in this case, against recent empirical findings. Such findings rather indicate that the more accentuated some characteristics of the ideal type are, the more inefficient the organisation becomes. In one sense, a great part of the literature on bureaucracy since Weber