Bureaucracy Syllabus

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Syllabus, PSC 335/535 "Bureaucratic Politics" - University of Rochester
Instructor: Stu Jordan
Overview: This course covers a selection of work in Political Science, Political Economy, and Economics on government bureaucracies.The works we examine are grouped into 5 topics: (1) Delegation of policy authority from politicians to bureaucrats, (2) the operation of patronage systems and explanations for the emergence of "merit systems", (3) the extent of "autonomous" bureaucratic influence in policy-making, (4) concerns over the "capture" of regulatory agencies by the firms they regulate, and (5) the role of bureaucrats’ motivations and policy preferences in the performance and design of bureaucratic institutions; Because my expertise is almost totally confined to U.S. politics, almost all the work reviewed addresses bureaucratic politics in the U.S.

Week 1 Delegation from Politicians to Bureaucrats: Overview and some Normative Motivation
Week 2 Explanations for Delegation: Blame Shifting and Credit-Claiming.
Week 3 Explanations for Delegation: Politicians’ Needs for Information
Week 4 Control by the U.S. Congress? Part 1
Week 5 Control by the U.S. Congress? Part 2
Week 6 Administrative Procedures as Instruments of Political Control
Week 7 Patronage vs. Merit, Part 1: How and Why Patronage Work(s/ed)
Week 8 Patronage vs. Merit, Part 2: The Transition from Patronage to Merit
Week 9 "Bureaucratic Autonomy"?
Week 10 Capture and Collusion, Part 1.
Week 11 Capture and Collusion, Part 2.
Week 12 "Motivated" Bureaucrats, Part 1.
Week 13 "Motivated" Bureaucrats, Part 2.

Sociology 110 - Formal Organizations and Bureaucracy
Instructor: Amy Davis - www.unc.edu/~abarden
This course has the following objectives: (1) study the founding, transformation, and disbanding of organizations (2) provide you with opportunities to develop writing skills and to work with others (3) provide you with an atmosphere that encourages the exploration and exchange of new ideas (4) help prepare you for your professional and/or academic careers.
Texts and Readings
The primary textbook we will read this semester is Organizations Evolving, by Howard Aldrich. I refer to it as HA in the course schedule, but here is the complete reference.
Aldrich, Howard. 1999. Organizations Evolving London: Sage.
We will also read excerpts from books and articles from academic and popular journals and newspapers. The textbook is available at the campus bookstore. The other readings are available on reserve at the Undergraduate Library and/or are electronically available on my website.

Course Topics
Introduction to Organizations Evolving
The Evolutionary Perspective.
New Organizations Part I. (Entrepreneurs and their Networks)
New Organizations Part II. (Knowledge and Resources)
Organizational boundaries Part I.
Organizational boundaries, Part II.
Turning employees into members
Managers
New Organizational Forms Part I.
New Organizational Forms Part II.
Organizational Transformation
Bureaucracy
Perrow, Charles. 1986. Complex Organizations: A Critical Essay. “Chapter 1: Why Bureaucracy?” Pp 1-36
Charismatic Control
Under what conditions is charismatic control effective in organizations? What is your reaction to charismatic control? What are some ways in which Direct Selling Organizations differ from Bureaucratic Organizations?
Organizational Power
How does the power pluralism view differ from the power elite view?
Organizations and Social Change
Why is it important to consider age, period, and cohort effects?
New Populations
Why do new populations have to establish legitimacy?
Why don’t these new populations have legitimacy?
Reproducing Populations: Foundings and Disbandings
According to Aldrich, how do small, local breweries survive given the dominance of beer producers like Budweiser?
Organizational Death
Sutton, Robert I. 1987. “The Process of Organizational Death: Disbanding and Reconnecting.” Administrative Science Quarterly 32:542-569.
What is a successful organizational disbanding?
Community Evolution

BUREAUCRACY

A formal organization with defined objectives, a hierarchy of specialized roles and systematic processes of direction and administration. Bureaucracy is found in earlier times in history, for example in administration of agricultural irrigation systems, the Roman army, the Catholic church, but it becomes most prominent in the large-scale administration of agencies of the modern state and modern business corporations.

Max Weber (1864-1920) gave particular attention to bureaucracy and saw this form of social organization becoming dominant in modern society due to the commitment to the value of rationalization - the organization of social activity so as to most efficiently achieve goals.

Bureaucracies enable governments to generate, process, distribute, and store information. Even the Egyptian, Roman, and other ancient empires were administered in part by bureaucracies. Yet the terms "bureaucracy," "bureaucratic," and "bureaucrat" are not ancient; they date from the 1830s and 1840s.

The growth of formal bureaucracy is a phenomenon of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the modern bureaucratic state is one of mankind's recent accomplishments. For organizations in both the public and private sectors, the bureaucracy represents an important, modern technology of control.

To some extent, a cyberocracy would be a bureaucracy changed by computers. This new form presumes the diffusion of advanced information and communications systems throughout a nation's government (and its public and private sectors generally). It also implies the rise of elites who rely on those systems and work to use them to their fullest capabilities.

But it would be a mistake to define a cyberocracy as a computerized bureaucracy, or a "cybercrat" as a bureaucrat with a computer. The new technology opens the doors to new capabilities and possibilities; it implies that things may be done differently. This difference may stem less from the computer someone may have than from the access it may provide to networks and databases outside one's office, and potentially across all branches and levels of government, in the private as well as the public sector, and internationally as well as domestically.

While bureaucracies are organized along thematic lines, big budgets and staffs are generally considered more important than information as bases of bureaucratic power. Moreover, the hierarchical structuring of bureaucracies into offices, departments, and lines of authority may confound the flow of information that may be needed to deal with complex issues in today's increasingly interconnected world.

Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, Random House Inc., New York, 1970. One of the first works to foresee that the information revolution would have a major impact on bureaucracy. He termed bureaucracy as "ad-hocracy,"

A good example of a bureaucracy is a university, where most of these characteristics exist. Of course, in the social world, no bureaucracy conforms exactly to the ideal type, and there is often favouritism, bending of rules, or incompetence. But many organizations have a large number of characteristics consistent with the ideal type. Further, the ideal type constitutes a model and the way that any actual bureaucracy operates can be compared to the ideal type. Often the complaints of individuals in bureaucratic organizations relate to ways in which some part of the ideal type is not met. For example, rules may not be clear or incumbents of a particular office may misuse their position.

While bureaucracies may limit freedom and form structures of domination, they are also necessary to carry out the administration of modern, complex society. If these bureaucratic forms did not exist, society would be worse off, in that actions would be carried out in an inefficient and wasteful manner.

At the same time, Weber notes that bureaucracies do tend to have great power. Their rational and efficient methods of administration, and their legitimate forms of authority do act to eliminate human freedom. Like Marx's alienation surplus value, Weber views bureaucracy as alienating (although he does not use this term) in that it is a set of structures which dominate people.

Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy has made it seem as if bureaucracies are inherently limiting to human freedom. While Weber praises bureaucracies for their efficiency and predictability, he feared that people would become too controlled by them. Weber does not appear to focus on the forces of freedom and equality that can come from bureaucracy. Standardized rules make it less possible for personal favours to be provided and for arbitrary directive to be given. Members of an organization may generally benefit from bureaucratic rules and regulations, and these make it possible for hiring and promotion to occur on the basis of merit. Rewards can be given for performance, rather than through favouritism and arbitrariness.

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