The concept of bureaucracy: sociological aspect

Abstract

The article discusses the features of the term ‘bureaucracy' in the context of related concepts - ‘state civil service (employees)', ‘officials', ‘the state apparatus'. Negative-evaluative meaning, embedded in the term ‘bureaucracy', prevented the study of the corresponding complex of phenomena for a long time, ignored the role of bureaucracy as a necessary component of the mechanism of the state and as a social institution. This influence was most noticeable in relation to the theory of the state civil service. In the West the partial rehabilitation of the concept of bureaucracy began in the mid-nineteenth century. This was facilitated by attempts to provide a reasoned distinction between political and public-administrative activities in order to rationalize public administration. Within the framework of this process, M. Weber constructed a model of an ideal bureaucracy. Simultaneously, a similarity between bureaucratic apparatuses ensuring the performance of state functions in both ancient and modern states, indicating under certain conditions the invariance of the given organizational model, was noted. In the twentieth century the bureaucracy was studied from the standpoint of systems theory and sociology. In Russia, the concept of bureaucracy up to the present time has had almost exclusively negative connotations. The absence of the theoretical consensus in the foreign and domestic science dealing with the delineation of the negative meaning of the term as a defect in the management mechanism and its neutral significance as a universal management mechanism and social institution continues to serve as an obstacle for the construction of a modern theory of the state civil service. Based on the results of the article, a research program is proposed in three basic areas: the general theory of bureaucracy, the mechanisms for transforming bureaucracy within the framework of various organizational cultures, the forms and patterns of negative inversion of the bureaucracy and the mechanisms for countering them.