Bureaucratic Rationality Revisited

A New Managerial Critique of the Colonial Bureaucracy in India

Abstract

For Weber, bureaucracy was an ideal type construct, which he used to understand the nature of transformation in social organisations through the development of human history. His view was that all organised efforts that humans make or have made in the past will eventually lead to a more legal-rational type of organisation which was the bureau. According to him it was the most rational type organisation that could ever exist and clearly it was a pure-type which could not be found in real world. It is the structure of the organisation which determines the flow of communication within organised channels (communicative rationality), it is the structure that determines the motivation and morale of the workforce (social capital), it is the structure of the organisation which determines the choices people make within and without the organisation (whether it is influenced by self-interest or public interest), and it is the structure of the organisation which determines amongst almost every other thing the organised decision-making within the organisation (bounded rationality). This paper tries to critically examine the existing literature on bureaucracy, co-relate it with the most current ideas of organisational re-engineering and attempts to explain and define Structured Rationality (pure-type) which may be a more realisable ideal for bureaucracy. It tries to take forward the evolution or transformation of human social organisation which Weber, Hegel and other theorists had predicted.