Posted in General, tagged General on 5 March 2006|
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Weber believes in a form of organization which based on human rationality, hierarchy of authority, expertise, division of labour, impersonality, and rules and regulations. The emergence of bureaucracy will have a relationship with the industralisation which occurs about 100years ago. Society has unconsciously moved from what Tonnie call Gemeinschaft (natural will) towards Gesselschaft (rational will), a form of society that fits urban society, when everyone is a stranger, and consist a higher moral density, and more restrictive law.
Bureaucracy fits with either Marxist socialism and Weberian capitalism, the only difference is that, Marxist sees from the conflict point of view, and weber is from its source of power that control the society. Marx argued that the most important aspect of human beings’ social life lay in the material basis of that life. Hence, most of marx’s writings can be described as materialist.
On the other hand, weber argued that this wasn’t wrong at all, he suggests it is the change from traditional to rational thinking what makes the difference. He thought that an equally important and valid perspective was to see a two-way process. Weber demonstrated that human motivation and ideas were the forces behind social change. Ideas and values, and beliefs had to power to bring about social transformation.
Weber beliefs in a rational economic man model and it bring us to a form of bureaucratic organization onto surface. He beliefs bureaucracy is the most efficient form of organisation, and he also develops the concept of ‘ideal type’. Rationality, which weber described as the application of reason to achieve a desired end, leads to greater predictability, calculability, co-ordination and control in all spheres of social life.
However, criticism about bureaucracy from michel, states that “who says organisation, says oligarchy”. Indeed, formal organisation of bureaucracies inevitably leads to oligarchy, under which organisations – originally idealistic and democratic, eventually come to be dominated by a small, self-serving group of people who achieved positions of power and responsibility.
Stewart Clegg – French bakery
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