Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

34 Public Management and Administration
best way of achieving results. In the abstract, responsibility is given to a
manager without a prescription as to how results are achieved. One of the
manager’s roles is to decide a way of working, and he or she is then personally
responsible if results are, or are not, forthcoming.
The problem of bureaucracy
A further problem with the traditional model focuses on the Weberian model
of bureaucracy. Critics argued that the structure and management of the traditional
model were obsolete and in need of drastic reform, because of problems
with the concepts of bureaucracy and bureaucratic organization. Formal
bureaucracy may have its advantages, but, it is argued, it also breeds timeservers
rather than innovators. It encourages administrators to be risk-averse
rather than risk-taking, and to waste scarce resources instead of using them
efficiently. Weber regarded bureaucracy as the highest form of organization,
but it is also criticized for producing inertia, lack of enterprise, red tape, mediocrity
and inefficiency, all diseases thought to be endemic in public sector bodies.
Indeed, the word ‘bureaucracy’ is today more usually regarded as a synonym
for inefficiency (Behn, 1998, p. 140). There are two particular problems with the
theory of bureaucracy. These are, first, the problematic relationship between
bureaucracy and democracy and, secondly, formal bureaucracy could no longer
be considered as a particularly efficient form of organization.
With its formal rationality, secrecy, rigidity and hierarchy, it seems inevitable
that there would be some conflict between bureaucracy and democracy. Weber
was ambivalent about bureaucracy. He saw it as inevitable that bureaucracy
would become universal as it ‘inevitably accompanies modern mass democracy’
(Gerth and Mills, 1970, p. 224), but equally, democracy ‘inevitably comes
into conflict with bureaucratic tendencies’ (p. 226). The ruled, for their part,
cannot dispense with or replace the bureaucratic apparatus of authority once it
exists (p. 229).
Weber described bureaucracy rather than advocating it, and, although he saw
it as inevitable with the modernization of society, there were clearly aspects
that worried him. There was and is some conflict between bureaucracy and
democracy; it did not make sense for a democracy to have a distinct elite acting
secretively. The individual bureaucrat, to Weber, hardly had an ideal life
(Gerth and Mills, 1970, p. 228):
The professional bureaucrat is chained to his activity by his entire material and ideal existence
… In the great majority of cases, he is only a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism,
which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march. The official is
entrusted with specialised tasks and normally the mechanism cannot be put into motion
or arrested by him, but only from the very top. The individual bureaucrat is thus forged
to the community of all the functionaries who are integrated into the mechanism. They
have a common interest in seeing that the mechanism continues its functions and that
societally exercised authority carries on.