Max Weber has made lots of contributions to the areas of organizational studies, management, and organizational communication. The main one is his contribution around the concept of bureaucracy. First of all, how do you pronounce his name? I've heard Weber, I've heard Weber.
I've looked all over the internet, I've informally surveyed my colleagues in academia and it's about 50-50. The Weber pronunciation is the Americanized style, the Americanized version of his name, and Weber is the more European pronunciation. I think both are acceptable and I personally recommend however your teacher says it, that's how you should pronounce it. He was a German sociologist and political economist. We use his concept of bureaucracy in organizational communication and organizational studies, but he actually wrote quite a lot of different areas and has influenced many areas of academia beyond just the workplace studies.
He saw the rise of large organizations bringing together large groups of people to manage, and that's not an easy thing. We're going from farms to factories, from smaller shops to larger organizations, and how are people going to do that? Well, he believed that the existing approaches to organizing that he saw had really obvious problems. especially around the area of authority.
He saw that most workplaces use relationships, kinship, or family in other words, or customs to lead and make decisions. This is called traditional authority, and he saw lots of problems with that. The main one was particularism, where employees were hired or fired for a variety of non-organizational reasons, such as their religion, race, sex, and relation or family connections.
We call this favoritism. And he called it particularism because a particular group of people was having a very disproportionate influence over the organization. So the decision-making was isolated in the hands of a few people, and it was very unlikely that they were going to be the most qualified people to run the organization at its best. He saw this as a disadvantage to organizations if they let this happen. And so he favored a more rational approach.
approach to running organizations. He wanted them to achieve their goals more rationally, especially through clarified leadership and clarified rules for decision making. In terms of leadership, he wanted what he called the legal rational authority, where the legitimate authority of leadership positions should be formalized and fixed to those positions. So it wasn't about if you had lots of charisma or if you were really persuasive.
or if you were related to a certain somebody, your legitimate authority came from the position that you occupied in the structure. In this way, he wanted to be consistent with societal law where organizations should be run by formal rules and policies. He wanted the organizations'rules and policies to parallel the kind of rules that we see in society.
And most importantly, he thought the authority should reside in the position or the office. It should not reside. with the individual person, their personality. Because let's say you're being supervised by somebody and they move out of that position and a new person moves in. Well, the person who's occupying that position should have decision-making power over you and your department.
The person who leaves should not still be having that kind of influence from the sidelines over the organization. So he wanted to keep it much more legal and rational. Bureaucracy has numerous parts. But first is division of labor among the participants. So division of labor is where we divide work into small, separate steps.
So let's say you want to finalize a semester schedule of courses at college. You would think that you might be able to just walk in, swipe your credit card, take your seat, and now you're enrolled in the course and off you go. But if you've ever been to a college campus, you know there's lots of different steps. This is chopped up. into seemingly endless steps.
So you have to figure out financial aid from one office. You get advised somewhere else. When you register, that's a separate process.
You have to pay through various ways. Then you confirm your course schedule. You get add codes and drop codes from somebody else. And so what should be or what could be very simple is divided into lots of different steps.
And there's reasons for this. One of them is so that, let's say, you swipe your credit card and let's say the professor's... runs off with that money, well, you're protected against that because you pay one department and then you take a course with another department. And so bureaucracy is meant to, again, protect against that disproportionate or lopsided influence. Hierarchy of offices is number two.
You're probably familiar with it. This where there's a kind of pyramid structure and at the bottom of that pyramid are all the employees and above that You have supervisors then managers and finally the big boss Number three a set of general rules that govern performance was a big part of bureaucracy So there are rules that govern how you perform the supervisor the people running things can't just make it up and change it from Depending upon their mood and who you are, let's say you're working at a place and they say productivity is important and you show good productivity. They say your sales numbers are important and you show that.
Customer service is important and you show that. Well, those are the general rules that everybody should be evaluated by. They shouldn't mark you high in these things and still fire you.
You should be able to get rewarded, promoted, and maybe even get a raise if you uphold the goals and follow the policies. Number four, A rigid separation of personal life from work life. This guards again against particularism. So let's say a couple gets married, they meet at work, they get married, and one of the people is still being supervised by the other.
What happens in many organizations is they will put the person who was being supervised in a different department so that their spouse is not directly supervising them. This guards against favoritism or that particularism. Number five, the selection of personnel is done on the basis of technical qualifications, and that pursues the equal treatment of all employees.
You're getting selected, you're getting promoted because you are the most qualified, not because you're the right or wrong religion or race, the wrong gender, the wrong family relationships, etc. Number six, participants view employment as a career and tenure protects against unfair arbitrary dismissal. Tenure meaning if you've been there for a while and you have what you might call veteran status, you're going to keep your job as long as you continue to do well.
They're not going to fire you for some minor or petty personal reason. You're going to basically keep your job. And these are the six points under bureaucracy.
And we see bureaucracies all over the place. Anytime you hear the word administration, You're generally talking about an organization that has chosen a bureaucratic style, like lots of different branches of government, college campuses, like I mentioned earlier, are really ideal or pure examples of bureaucracies. The military is a classic example. Large companies, even for-profit corporations, often organize in a bureaucratic style, and certainly factories like Volkswagen, or if you're in Europe, Volkswagen, just like... like we pronounce it Weber in Europe.
Factories often choose to be organized in a bureaucratic style of structure. The legacy of Weber's bureaucracy is a little bit mixed. Some people, of course, will still attempt to take advantage, even though Weber wanted to guard against particularism, against favoritism. Some people, of course, can operate in just about any structure and try to find a personal advantage. There's also the concept of red tape.
That's a term you often hear associated with bureaucracies, and that's the overemphasis on structure, policies, and procedure that slows or prevents needed action. So if you've ever worked inside a bureaucracy, then you know what I mean. It feels as if just to do anything, you are constrained by the limits of the organization, and you are.
You are constrained. That's what it's there for. However, sometimes it's constraining what should be positive action. Weber called this the iron cage where people were trapped in what he's called calculated systems that pursue efficiency and control that threaten individual freedom.
So you might feel like you're just stuck in your own little box, in your own little divided area of labor, on your rung of the hierarchy, and that's all you can really do is stay there and do the little bit of work that you're given. So the legacy is mixed. Weber saw this as much better than the alternative, like traditional authority and that particularism, and certainly better than a more charismatic style of leadership where it's based upon the person's personality. We look to Max Weber quite often in organizational studies.
His work has been cited consistently for decades by tens of thousands of researchers and scholars, and very recently still his work is more cited than ever. A very influential figure. a foundational researcher and author in the area of organizational studies, and that's why we study Max Weber's concept of bureaucracy.