There were also serious criticisms regarding the model itself, including claims of empirical inaccuracy. The model’s reception was not only negative because of de-contextualized reading and misinterpretation. In post–World War II public administration literature, Weber’s model was made into the scapegoat for unfashionable bureaucracy based on hierarchy and red tape.
Due to its simplicity and how catchy it was, the model was prone to become a stereotype, which is exactly what happened. The model received immense scholarly attention. His bürgerlicher (bourgeois) background and his politically liberal stance contributed to the model’s normative objective of keeping administration out of democratic politics. Weber’s rationalization thesis draws from his sociology of rule, which comprises three types of authority: charismatic, traditional, and rational. To Weber, modernization and people’s corresponding transformed worldviews were preconditions for rational rule and inevitably led to rational bureaucracy. The model is not an isolated concept it derives from Weber’s historical analysis of modernization and the emergence of the rational state, and serves as the epitome of it. Weberian bureaucracy is part of his broader sociology and must therefore be understood as part of its methodological, theoretical, and empirical context. Weber never meant it to be a descriptive nor a prescriptive account of how bureaucracy should be. An ideal type is an analytical construct against which to contrast empirical observations. At the ideal type’s core lies a hierarchically structured, professional, rule-bound, impersonal, meritocratic, and disciplined body of public servants who possess a specific set of competences and who operate outside the sphere of politics.
His ideal type of bureaucracy consists of a number of organizational features of administrative order.
The term Weberian bureaucracy refers to Max Weber’s (1864–1920) ideal type (or model) of rational bureaucracy, published in Economy and Society posthumously in 1921/22 by his wife Marianne Weber.
0 kommentar(er)
