What is your understanding of bureaucracy? discuss
****Please refer to the attached module. Thank you.
LESSUN 5: THE NATURE AND DEVELOPMENT OF PHILIPPINE BUREAUCRACY Bureaucracy refers to both a body of non-elective government officials and an administrative policy-making group. Historically, a bureaucracy was agovernment administration managed by departments staffed with non-elected officials. Today, bureaucracy is the administrative system governing any large institution, whether publicly owned or privately owned. The public administration in many countries is an example of a bureaucracy, but so is the centralized hierarchical structure of a business firm. Since being coined, the word bureaucracy has developed negative connotations for some. Some bureaucracies have been criticized as being inefficient, convoluted. or too inflexible to individuals. The dehumanizing effects of excessive bureaucracy became a major theme in the work of German-language writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and are central to his novels The Trial and The Castle. The 1985 dystopian film Brazil by Terry Gilliam portrays a farcical macabre world in which small, otherwise insignificant errors in the bureaucratic processes of government develop into maddening and tragic consequences. The elimination of unnecessary bureaucracy is a key concept in modern managerial theory and has been an issue in some political campaigns. Some commentators have noted the necessity of bureaucracies in modern society. The German sociologist Max Weber argued that bureaucracy constitutes the most efficient and rational way in which human activity can be organized and that systematic 1 Lesson 8: The Nature and Development of Philippine Bureaucracy processes and organized hierarchies are necessary to maintain order, maximize efficiency, and eliminate favoritism. On the other hand, Weber also saw unfettered bureaucracy as a threat to individual freedom, with the potential of trapping individuals in an impersonal "iron cage" of rule-based, rational control. Etymology and usage The term "bureaucracy" is French in origin and combines the French word bureau - desk or office - with the Greek word kpaTos (Kratos) - rule or political power. It was coined in the mid-18th century by the French economist Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay. Gournay never wrote the term down but was later quoted at length in a letter from a contemporary: The late M. de Gournay... sometimes used to say: "We have an illness in France which bids fair to play havoc with us; this illness is called bureaumania." Sometimes he used to invent a fourth or fifth form of government under the heading of "bureaucracy." - Baron von Grimm The first known English-language use dates to 1818. With Irish novelist Lady Morgan referring to "the Bureaucratie, or office tyranny, by which Ireland has so long been governed." By the mid-19th century, the word was being used in a more neutral sense, referring to a system of public administration in which offices were held by unelected career officials. In this sense "bureaucracy" was seen as a distinct form of management, 2 Lesson 8: The Nature and Development of Philippine Bureaucracyoften subservient to a monarchy.[2l In the 19203, the definition was expanded by the German sociologist Max Weber to include any system of administration conducted by trained professionals according to fixed rules. Weber saw the bureaucracy as a relatively positive development; however, by 1944 the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises opined in the context of his experience in the Nazi regime that the term bureaucracy was "always applied with an opprobrious connotation," and by 1957 the American sociologist Robert Merton suggested that the term "bureaucrat" had become an epithet in some circumstances. History Ancient: Although the term "bureaucracy" first originated in the mid-18th century, organized and consistent administrative systems existed much earlier. The development of writing (c. 3500 BC) and the use of documents was critical to the administration of this system, and the first definitive emergence of bureaucracy occurred in ancient Sumer, where an emergent class of scribes used clay tablets to administer the harvest and to allocate its spoils Ancient Egypt also had a hereditary class of scribes that administered the civil-service bureaucracy. A hierarchy of regional proconsuls and their deputies administered the Roman Empire. The reforms of Diocletian (Emperor from 284 to 305) doubled the number of administrative districts and led to a large-scale expansion of Roman bureaucracy. The early Christian author Lactantius (c. 250 - c. 325) claimed that Diocletian's reforms led to widespread economic stagnation, since \"the provinces were divided into minute portions, 3 Lesson 8: The Nature and Development of Philippine Bureaucracy and many presidents and a multitude of inferior officers lay heavy on each territory." After the Empire split, the Byzantine Empire developed a notoriously complicated administrative hierarchy, and in the 20th century the term "Byzantine" came to refer to any complex bureaucratic structure. Modem The United Kingdom- The 18th century Department of Excise developed a sophisticated bureaucracy. Pictured, the Custom House, London. Instead of the inefficient and often corrupt system of tax farming that prevailed in absolutist states such as France, the Exchequer was able to exert control over the entire system of tax revenue and government expenditure. By the late 18th century, the ratio of fiscal bureaucracy to population in Britain was approximately 1 in 1300, almost four times larger than the second most heavily bureaucratized nation, France. Thomas Taylor Meadows, Britain's consul in Guangzhou, argued in his Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China (1847) that \"the long duration of the Chinese empire is solely and altogether owing to the good government which consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only," and that the British must reform their civil service by making the institution meritocratic, Influenced by the ancient Chinese imperial examination, the NorthooteTrevelyan Fteport of 1854 recommended that recruitment should be on the basis of merit determined through competitive examination, candidates should have a solid general education to enable inter-departmental transfers, and promotion should be c. Lesson 8: The Nature and Development of Philippine Bureaucracy through achievement rather than "preferment, patronage, or purchase". This led to implementation of Her Majesty's Civil Service as a systematic, meritocratic civil service bureaucracy. France- Like the British, the development of French bureaucracy was influenced by the Chinese system. Under Louis XIV of France, the old nobility had neither power nor political influence, their only privilege being exemption from taxes. The dissatisfied noblemen complained about this "unnatural" state of affairs, and discovered similarities between absolute monarchy and bureaucratic despotism. With t translation of Confucian texts during the Enlightenment, the concept of a meritocracy reached intellectuals in the West, who saw it as an alternative to the traditional ancien regime of Europe. Western perception of China even in the 18th century admired the Chinese bureaucratic system as favourable over European governments for its seeming meritocracy; Voltaire claimed that the Chinese had "perfected moral science" and Francois Quesnay advocated an economic and political system modeled after that of the Chinese. The governments of China, Egypt, Peru and Empress Catherine Il were regarded as models of Enlightened Despotism, admired by such figures as Diderot, D'Alembert and Voltaire. Napoleonic France adopted this meritocracy system and soon saw a rapid and dramatic expansion of government, accompanied by the rise of the French civil service and its complex systems of bureaucracy. This phenomenon became known as "bureaumania". In the early 19th century, Napoleon attempted to reform the bureaucracies of France and other territories under his control by the imposition of the Lesson 8: The Nature and Development of Philippine Bureaucracystandardized Napoleonic Code. But paradoxically, that led to even further growth of the bureaucracy. Other industrialized nations- By the mid-19th century, bureaucratic forms of administration were firmly in place across the industrialized world. Thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Marx began to theorize about the economic functions and power- structures of bureaucracy in contemporary life. Max Weber was the first to endorse bureaucracy as a necessary feature of modernity, and by the late 19th century bureaucratic forms had begun their spread from government to other large-scale institutions. The trend toward increased bureaucratization continued in the 20th century, with the public sector employing over 5% of the workforce in many Western countries. Within capitalist systems, informal bureaucratic structures began to appear in the form of corporate power hierarchies, as detailed in mid-century works like The Organization Man and 1719 Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc nations, a powerful class of bureaucratic administrators termed nomenklatura governed nearly all aspects of public life. The 19803 brought a backlash against perceptions of "big government" and the associated bureaucracy. Politicians like Margaret Thatcher and Reagan gained power by promising to eliminate government regulatory bureaucracies, which they saw as overbearing. and return economic production to a more purely capitalistic mode, which they saw as more efficient. In the business world, managers like Jack Welch gained 6 Lesson 8: The Nature and Development of Philippine Bureaucracy fortune and renown by eliminating bureaucratic structures inside corporations. Still, in the modern world, most organized institutions rely on bureaucratic systems to manage information, process records, and administer complex systems, although the decline of paperwork and the widespread use of electronic databases is transforming the way bureaucracies function. References: http://lynchlibrary.pssc.org.ph:8081/bitstream/handle/0/4024/05 Reinventing%20Gover nment%20and%20Bureaucracy%20in%20the%20Phils..pdf?sequence=1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy 7 Lesson 8: The Nature and Development of Philippine Bureaucracy
