Maybe It Is Time to Rediscover Bureaucracy

Abstract

This article questions the fashionable ideas that bureaucratic organization is an obsolescent, undesirable, and non-viable form of administration and that there is an inevitable and irreversible paradigmatic shift towards market-or network-organization. In contrast, the paper argues that contemporary democracies are involved in another round in a perennial debate and ideological struggle over what are desirable forms of administration and government: that is, a struggle over institutional identities and institutional balances. The argument is not that bureaucratic organization is a panacea and the answer to all challenges of public administration. Rather, bureaucratic organization is part of a repertoire of overlapping, supplementary, and competing forms coexisting in contemporary democracies, and so are market-organization and network-organization. Rediscovering Weber's analysis of bureaucratic organization, then, enriches our understanding of public administration. This is in particular true when we (a) include bureaucracy as an institution, not only an instrument; (b) look at the empirical studies in their time and context, not only at Weber's ideal-types and predictions; and (c) take into account the political and normative order bureaucracy is part of, not only the internal characteristics of ''the bureau.'' MAKING SENSE OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Is ''bureaucracy'' an organizational dinosaur helplessly involved in its death struggle? Is it an undesirable and nonviable form of administration developed in a legalistic and authoritarian society and now inevitably withering away because it is incompatible with complex, individualistic, and dynamic societies? Are, therefore, the term bureaucracy and the theoretical ideas and empirical observations associated with it, irrelevant or deceptive when it comes to making sense of public administration and government in contemporary democracies? Or are the mobilization of antibureaucratic sentiments and the claim that it is time to say goodbye to bureaucracies and bureaucrats just another round in a perennial debate and ideological struggle over what desirable forms of administration and government are-that An earlier version of this article was presented as a keynote speech at the Ninth International Congress of Centro Lationoamericano de Administracion Para el Desarrollo (CLAD) on State and Public Administration Reform, Madrid, 4 November 2004. The original version will be printed in Spanish in Revista del CLAD Reforma y Democracia (Caracas). I thank H.

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