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

Bureaucratic and Normative Control - Essay ExampleActually power structure in general (in the sense of levels of authority) is to be found in any administration which has a sure full point of magnitude and complexity. The feudal type of administration had a complicated hierarchical system. (Davis, 1994, p73) There is hierarchy of a social rank corresponding to the hierarchy of fiefs through the process of sub-infatuation... 6 But the difference amongst the two kinds of hierarchies, according to Weber, is to be found in the type of authority relations. In the feudal eggshell the relationship between inferior and superior is personal and the legitimating of authority is based on a smell in the sacredness of tradition. In a bureaucracy, authority is legitimised by a belief in the correctness of the rules and the homage of the bureaucrat is oriented to an impersonal order, to a superior position, not to the person who holds it. So what makes an administration much or less bureaucr atic from the hierarchical point of view is not the number of levels of authority, or the size of it of the span of control the decisive criterion is whether or not the authority relations have a precise and impersonal character, as a result of the elaboration of rational rules.Concerning first the criterion of meaty adequacy, it does not necessarily make sense to some cardinal that a type of organisation having the Weberian characteristics to an extreme degree should yield maximum efficiency. One could equally well imagine such an organisation as creation 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 semiempirical research done since Weber, one can argue that a perfectly rational-efficient organisation having Webers ideal characteristics is not objectively possible, 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