KONDRATYEV VLADISLAV P.

To date, the bureaucracy as a structural element of the state and as a large social group has been studied mainly in statics. Traditionally, the subject of consideration is the place of officialdom in the political system, its ability to be an effective instrument of social management, to represent an almost ideal hierarchical organizational system, and, at the same time, its tendency to form and carry out clan interests. The complexity and contradictory nature of this phenomenon, along with the ambiguity of assessments assigned to it by various theoretical and ideological aspects, do not take into account the ability of bureaucracy to transform and significantly change its functional characteristics within relatively short historical period. Indirect signs of such changes can be found in the history of states and public service. These changes cannot always be interpreted as progress or movement toward more advanced forms. On the contrary, the administrative apparatus of the state sometimes regresses, becomes costly, inefficient, and a burden on both the state and the society. At the same time, the state’s legal system and political order do not undergo notable changes. The goal of the study is to identify the principles and mechanisms of bureaucratic organization change, including the «life cycle» model, to assess the possibility of identifying patterns of such change. The methodology of the study is the analysis of sources on the theory of bureaucracy, as well as a comparison with empirical data from the history of state-building in Russia and abroad. As a result of the research, certain shortcomings of the concept of the «life cycle of bureaucracy», proposed by E. Downs, were revealed, and methods for identifying internal and external prerequisites and patterns of change in bureaucratic structures were outlined.

The article presents the main approaches to organizing sociological monitoring of the state civil service in Russia. The paper uses a methodical approach to assess several essential characteristics of the civil service; this includes “basic” variables and explanatory variables. The introduction of sociological monitoring involves the implementation of infrastructure and some specific processes. The infrastructure includes the organizational elements of monitoring, and the processes are disclosed through the order of actions necessary for the implementation of monitoring. Regular sociological monitoring allows us to collect data for analysis of the state of public service in the dynamics by comparing results over time. The results obtained can be used to identify development trends, as well as to compile questions for semi-structured interviews.

The article attempts to substantiate the relationship between the design of the traditional bureaucratic administrativeapparatus, its role as an indispensable tool of public administration and at the same time the tendency to generate dysfunctions,transformation into pseudo-administrative structures, ruinous for the state and society. It is suggested that the features of thebureaucracy are due to its specific structural role: having no formal right to develop and make political decisions, it is the main‘administrative resource', without property, it is included in the management of the main resource assets of the state. Unlikepolitical actors, the population, business entities, bureaucracy has no direct interest in the processes and results of their relationswith each other: it focuses on the performance of administrative functions. However, this nominally instrumental role of bureaucracycan be supported only in a narrow range of conditions, which include: a clear distinction between political and administrative roles,clarity of goals and objectives of the state, openness of decision-making and management processes, the presence of effectiveethical regulators of officials' work, perfect system of their material and non-material motivation, and many others. Insufficientattention to these factors leads to the fact that the administrative apparatus by default expands its powers, refocuses externaltasks to its own needs, attracting available public and private resources to achieve them. This established solidary interest of theprofessional community, its propensity to social self-isolation and even the acquisition of domestic ‘sovereignty' leads to thetransformation of a working administrative apparatus into a Bureaucracy in the negative sense of this word. At the same time,there are reasons to recognize this destructive process as natural: in the absence of other incentives, people and the communityfocus on personal/group needs.

The article attempts to consider bureaucracy as an instrument of public administration from the standpoint of the methodology of structural and functional analysis. The use of this methodology is intended to identify and describe the structural components and elementary functions, as well as structural and functional features of the bureaucracy as such, regardless of the traits that it acquires in a particular country in a certain historical era. Bureaucracy is seen as an element of the social structure, which in turn has stable principles of internal organization. These principles include the hierarchical form of the organization, and the formal hierarchy of posts and the informal hierarchy of job statuses may not be the same. It is noted that the hierarchical principle of management in bureaucratic structures, unlike commercial management, has no alternatives and is carried out much more consistently. Special attention is paid to the analysis of terminological problems arising in the process of analyzing the functions of bureaucracy. The concept of ‘administration', implying the presence of specific organizational and managerial procedures in the Russian language until now has limited use and is usually accompanied by negative connotations. It is proposed to classify the functions of bureaucracy by features: formal and informal, external and internal. Identification of informal functions of bureaucracy allows to identify its features as a large social group and status group. The analysis of internal functions also creates additional opportunities for describing and evaluating bureaucracy from the point of view of the theory and sociology of organizations. In conclusion, the article points to some structural and functional features of the bureaucracy that distinguish it from the organizational models characteristic of commercial organizations and public associations.

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.