Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
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!
Followers
Blog Archive
-
▼
2009
(64)
-
▼
April
(17)
- 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
-
▼
April
(17)
In order to be considered a rational bureaucracy, an organization must meet at least three preconditions as laid out in Max Weber’s Bureaucracy. First and foremost, the economy surrounding the organization must be a money economy, because without it, it would be necessary for bureaucratic officials to exploit their subordinates (204-5). Secondly, the means of administration must be concentrated. Before the development of bureaucracy, the means of getting money is diffuse and must be concentrated in order to expropriate the peasants. The same is true politically with officials in the administration. The third and final necessary pre-condition of bureaucracy is a society or organization that has consistent rules and laws that allow for fair and unbiased adjudication. Weber claims that as a final step before bureaucracy, democracy must form, ridding a society of status differences and leaving them with only their class differences so that each person can be treated impersonally and without favors (224).
ReplyDeleteOnce the preconditions are established, a rational bureaucracy can ideally form. According to Weber, there are six features of this institution: fixed jurisdiction, a hierarchy of offices, management through documents, expert training, full-time officials, and management through rules. All of this, which will be further explained with respect to baseball later, allow the top official in a bureaucratic institution, and therefore each of his subordinates, to hold his office as a vocation and use his job for the abstract duty of the office (198). Official positions are characterized in a bureaucracy by a fixed salary, social esteem, a career attitude, tenure for life and appointment.
The professional sport of baseball is bureaucratized, but not a purely rational bureaucracy. While the majority of professional athletes seem to be overpaid for what they do, and there is a lot of talk about the movement from the purity of sport in college athletics before moving on to the corruption of the big leagues, professional baseball players are taking an economic hit this year as a result of the struggling economy (NY Times article). This shows that professional athletes, baseball players in particular, view their jobs as vocations, using them for the duty of the office.
In professional baseball the fixed jurisdiction, which includes the duty of the job and the qualified personnel (players) that participate, mean that the limited and special function of baseball in American society to provide entertainment as the great American pastime, fulfils the first characteristic of bureaucracy. Secondly, there is a hierarchy of positions within every club, from the owner down to the batboys, making it very clear which people are superior and which are subordinate. Each official (owner to batboy) has a contract that they are required to uphold, showing that there is management through documents. Fourth, these athletes and their coaches are expertly trained, having to work their way up from the bottom and get scouted in order to be on these professional teams in the first place. Major League Baseball as a whole has rules about what is and is not allowed before, during, and after play, demonstrating that there is management through rules and privileges are not easily obtained. However, as the players are doing what they love, they may or may not be viewed as full-time officials, leaving out an essential element of the rational bureaucracy.
This mostly rational bureaucracy, in contrast with the patrimonialism that exists on adult amateur baseball teams, allows us to better see what bureaucracy looks like outside of the theoretical and in something that so many Americans love.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/sports/baseball/09salaries.html?ref=baseball
This is an interesting memo. I had never considered that baseball was organized bureaucratically before. But then again, until reading Weber I was not always conscious of bureaucratic organization. Can you elaborate on why baseball is bureaucratic but not a rational bureaucracy?
ReplyDeleteI was very surprised by realizing how even baseball has the structure of a bureaucracy. It seems that bureaucratization seems to infiltrate every part of life. There is a continous movement from spontaneous, non-rule regulated activity to systematization and more and more rules. Is that the utopia of Marx; establishing a self-regulated society where these rules and regulations imposed from the outside aren't necessary?
ReplyDeleteCristal, I think baseball is a mostly rational bureaucracy according to Weber's theory, but I don't think that it is purely a rational bureaucracy because, like I said, I'm not sure that officials in the sport are full-time officials, with a complete separation of work from home. I could be wrong about this, but that was my interpretation and intent in stating that.
ReplyDeleteAnd Anders, I think that, if anything, this movement toward a self-regulated society is the ideal of Foucault, not Marx. Marx was looking for revolution and a movement toward communism, while the theories of Weber and Foucault both operate in a capitalist society and idealize self-governance and self-policing.
This is a well written memo. I really like how you compared baseball to rational Bureaucracy. I like how you indicated that "There is a hierarchy of positions within every club, from the owner down to the batboys, making it very clear which people are superior and which are subordinate." By just reading this, I imagine a baseball game and see how there is a hierarchy of different positions that i have always wondered about before I've learned about Bureaucracy.
ReplyDeletenicely written
best
wafa
interesting discussion! point of clarification: neither Foucault nor Marx idealize self-policing. Foucault sees it as a result of disciplinary power, which we can infer he views negatively. the regulated society is Gramsci's term for socialism.
ReplyDeletebest,
mike