(lively music) - [Narrator] Max Weber has
made lots of contributions to the areas or organizational studies, management and
organizatinal communication. And the main one is his contribution around the concept of bureaucracy. First of all, how do
you pronounce his name? I've heard Weber, I've heard Veyber. I've looked all over the internet. I've informally surveyed
my colleauges in academia and it's about 50/50. The Weber pronunciation
is the Americanized style, the Americanized version of his name, and Veyber is the more
European pronunciation. I think both are acceptable
and I personally recommend, however your teacher says it, that's how you should pronounce it. He was a German sociologist
and political economist. We use his concept of bureaucracy in organizatoinal communication
and organizational studies, but he actually wrote quite
a lot of different areas and has influenced many areas of academia beyond just the workplace studies. He saw the rise of large organizations bringing together large
groups of people to manage and that's not an easy thing. We're going from farms to factories, from smaller shops to larger organizations and how are people gonna do that? Well, he believed that
the existing approaches to our organizing that he saw
had really obvious problems, especially around the area of authority. He saw that most workplaces
used relationships, kinship or family in other words, or customs to lead and make decisions. This is called traditional authority. He saw lots of problems with that. The main one was particularism, where employees were hired
or fired for a variety of non-organizational reasons,
such as their religion, race, sex, and relation
or family connections. We call this favoritism. He called it particularism
because a particular group of people was having a very
disporportionate influence over the organization. The decision making was
isolated in the hands of a few people and it was
very unlikely that they were going to be the
most qualitifed people to run the organization at its best. He saw this as a
disadvantage to organizations if they let this happen. He favored a more rational approach to running organizations. He wanted them to achieve
their goals more rationally, especially through clarified leadership and clarified rules for decision making. In terms of leadership,
he wanted what he called the legal, rational authority, where the legitimate authority
of leadership positions should be formalized and
fixed to those positions. So it wasn't about if
you had lots of charisma or if you're really persuasive, or if you were related
to a certain someobdy, your letitimate authority
came from the position that you occupied in the strucutre. In this way, he wanted to be
consistent with societal law where organizations should be run by formal rules and policies. He wanted the organizations
rules and policies to parallel the kind of
rules that we see in society. And most importantly, he thought
the authority should reside in the position or the office. It should not reside with
the individual person, the personality, because let's
say you're being supervised by somebody and they
move out of that position and a new person moves in. The person who's occuping
that position should have decision-making power
over you and your department. The person who leaves
should not still be having that kind of influence from the side lines over the organization. So he wanted to keep it much
more legal and rational. Bureaucracy has numerous parts. The first is division of
labor among the participants. So division of labor
is where we divide work into small, separate steps. So let's say you want to finalize a semester schedule of courses at college. You would think that you
may be able to just walk in, swipe your credit card, take your seat, and now you're entrolled in
the course and off you go. But if you've ever been
to a college campus, you know there's lots of different steps. This is chopped up into
seemingly endless steps. So you have to figure out
financial aid for one office, you get advised somewhere else. When you register, that's
a separate process. You have to pay through various ways. Then you confirm your course schedule. You get add codes and drop
codes from somebody else. And so, what should be or
what could be very simple is divided into lots of different steps. And there's reasons for this. One of them is so that, let's say you swipe your
credit card and let's say the professor runs off with that money, well, you're protected
against that because you pay one department and then you take a course with another department. And so, bureaucracy is meant to, again, protect against disproprtionate
or lopsided influence. Hierarchy of offices is number two. You're probably familiar with this, where there's a kind of pyramid structure. And at the bottom of that
pyramid are all the employees and above that, you have
supervisors, then managers, and finally, the big boss. Number three, a set of general rules that govern performance was
big part of bureaucracy. So there are rules that
govern how you perform. The supervisor, the people running things, can't just make it up and change it from, depending upon their mood and who you are. Let's say you're working at a place and they say productivity is important and you show good productivity. They say your sales numbers are important and you show that. Customer service is
important and you show that. Well, those are the general
rules that everybody should be evaluated by. They shouldn't mark you high in these things and still fire you. You should be able to
get rewarded, promoted, and maybe even get a raise
if you uphold the goals and follow the policies. Number four, a rigid separation of personal life from work life. This guards, again, against particularism. So let's say a couple gets married, they meet at work, they get married. And one of the people is still being supervised by the other. What happens in many
organizations is they will put the person who was being supervised in a different department
so that their spouse is not directly supervising them. This guards against favortism
or that particularism. Number five, the selection
of personnel is done on the basis of technical qualifications and that pursues the equal
treatment of all employees. You're getting selected, you're getting promoted because
you are the most qualified, not because you're the right
or wrong religion or race, wrong gender, wrong
family relationships, etc. Number six, participants
view employment as a career and tenure protects against
unfair arbitrary dismissal. Tenure meaning if you've
been there for awhile and you have what you
might call veteran status, you're gonna keep your job as long as you continue to do well. They're not gonna fire you for some minor or petty personal reason. You're gonna basically keep your job. These are the six points under bureaucracy and we see bureaucracies
all over the place. Any time you hear the word administration, you're generally talking
about an organization that has chosen a
bureaucratic style like lots of different brancehs of government, college campuses, like
I mentioned earlier, are really ideal or pure
examples of bureaucracies. The military is a classic example. Large companies, even for-profit
corporations often organize in a bureaucractic style. And certainly factories like Volkswagen or if you're in Europe, Volksvagen, just like we pronounced
it Veyber in Europe. Factories often choose to be organized in a bureaucractic style of structure. The legacy of Weber's bureaucracy
is a little bit mixed. Some people, of course, will still attempt to take advantage, even thoguh Weber wanted to guard against particularism, against favoritsm. Some people, of course,
can operate in just about any structure and try
to find a personal advantage. There's also the concept of red tape. That's a term you often hear
associated with bureaucracies and that's the overemphais
on strucutre, policies, and procedure that slows
or prevents needed action. So if you've ever worked
inside a bureaucracy, then you know what I mean. It feels as if just to do anything, you are constrained by the limits of the organziation and you are. You are constrained,
that's what it's there for. However, sometimes it's constraining what should be positive action. Weber called this the iron
cage where people were trapped in what he's called calculated systems that pursue efficiency and control that threatened individual freedom. So you might feel like you're just stuck in your own little box, in your own little divided area of labor, on your rung of the
hierarchy and that's all you can really do is stay
there and do the little bit of work that you're given. So the legacy is next. Weber saw this as much
better than the alternative, like traditional authority
and that particularism and certainly better than
a more charismatic style of leadership or is based
upon the person's personality. We look to Max Weber quite
often in organizational studies. His work has been cited
consistently for decades by tens of thousands of
researchers, scholars, and very recently still, his
work is more cited than ever. Very influential figure,
a foundational researcher, and author in the area of
organizational studies. And that's why we study Max
Weber's concept of bureaucracy.
