Sunday, April 12, 2009
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This is a blog for a community of students in Mike Levien's sections of Sociology 101B: "Sociological Theory," in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, Spring 2009.
Theory Rocks!
This is the informal blog spot for Mike Levien's section of Sociology 101B. For the rest of the semester, we'll use this blog to clarify the work(s) of Durkheim, Weber, Foucault, de Beauvoir, MacKinnon, and Collins. Feel free to endlessly post, and don't forget: Theory Rocks!
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2009
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April
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- Bureaucracy in concrete
- Weber's Rational Bureaucracy within East Bay Conso...
- Bureaucracy and the Human Rights Campaign
- Military and Rational Bureaucracy
- The Spirit of Capitalism
- Rational Bureaucracy and Safe Passage
- Weber's Rational Bureaucracy in Maganda
- An Institution of Rational Bureaucracy
- Weber's Rational Bureaucracy and the Children's Sh...
- Rational Bureaucracy in Professional Baseball
- This short memo illustrates the fundamental featu...
- Rational Bureaucracy in The Western Hemisphere Ins...
- Bureaucracy in School
- Weber's Rational Bureaucracy in Public High Schools
- Rational Bureaucracy in the American Red Cross
- Weber' Bureaucracy in a Middle School Tutoring Agency
- Bureaucracy and the Men's Story Project
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April
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The first characteristic of a rational bureaucracy is fixed jurisdiction. The officials of the bureau/office have regular and specific activities that are distributed in a fixed way, according to rules and administrative regulations (196). The bureau is structured hierarchically as a monocracy, where each level of the office has some autonomy due to its specialized function (197). As opposed to the verbal agreements and favour ‘bank’ of patrimonialism, bureaucracy is managed through written documents, all catalogued for future reference (197). Where other forms of administration relied on succession, expert training and skill is the basis of the modern bureaucracy, establishing formal requirements for the position of the official and protecting him from the whims of a higher authority (198, 201). Along with general, stable and learnable rules, this provides the basis of creating a vocation and “tenure for life” for the official (198ff). In contrast to patrimonialism, the more the bureaucracy is developed, the greater is the separation between work and home (197).
ReplyDeleteWeber says that the development of a money economy is totally necessary to give the official “pecuniary compensation” (204). Another precondition for the rise of the modern bureaucracy was the expropriation and concentration of the means of administration (205). In pre-bureaucratic times state officials were to a greater extent independent and in control of “the sources of taxation”. Through this development, the office now provides the official with a salary, making him loyal to his position, in a way establishing him as a ‘wage labourer’. Thirdly, Weber claims that the rationalization that is crucial to the efficiency and sustainability of the modern bureaucracy originated in Roman Law (216, 218). One element is the rational form of the law, and the other is how they used “rationally trained experts” in trials, rather than relying on less rational or mystical sources of evidence.
Safe Passage is similar to a bureaucracy in that it consists of separated, though interdependent functions. These include physically ‘departments’ for school and medical clinic, and two different locations for these and the office. Thus, there is some sense of fixed jurisdiction. There are different programs such as “nutritional programs”, “sport programs” and “social programs”. This relates to management through documents. Most of the children involved in the project did not have any documents such as ID and medical records, but these come into existence through registration, getting medical examinations etc. This is not only for the children but also for their whole family, as community workers provide “case management services for every child and his/her family”. The people involved in this project range from local staff such as teachers to volunteers from all over the world, trained (doctors, teachers) and untrained. Many of these work there only for a small period of time, a minimum of six weeks, i.e. they are far from having any vocation. Separation of home and work is clear: The facilities are placed nearby the garbage dump and the slums where the families live and the volunteers and staff come in from different parts of the city, or from another city.
Some parts of Safe Passage do correspond to the characteristics of a rational bureaucracy. The project relies mainly on donations to survive, and is not made to generate income, but being cost-efficient, having the greatest amount of impact per dollar, will obviously be a concern to gather more sponsors and donations. That would be the main incentive for rationality. The day-to-day life in the project, on the other hand, is not congruent with the rule-bound and formal structure of a modern bureaucracy as portrayed in Weber. In practice, working as a volunteer, there were practically no paperwork and few rules to follow. Some rules and guidelines were established initially and there was a timetable that was followed loosely. There were no formal requirements for working there and most of the learning, of the volunteers that is, happened informally, through adaptation and verbal feedback.