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Authority and Power in Bureaucratic and Patrimonial Administration: A Revisionist Interpretation of Weber on Bureaucracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Lloyd I. Rudolph  and
Susanne Hoeber Rudolph
Lloyd I. Rudolph
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Susanne Hoeber Rudolph
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Abstract

Weber's understanding of bureaucracy, despite substantial qualification and revision, remains the dominant paradigm for the study of administration and formal organizations. We continue the process of revision by accepting his ideal-typical concepts of bureaucratic and patrimonial administration, but subject them to theoretical and historical reinterpretation and application. Our reading of historical change as it relates to bureaucracy leads us to question Weber's interpretations. His conceptualization of bureaucracy in terms of rational-legal-authority and formal rationality fails to take account of the existence and use of power within and outside of organizations, and of the persistence of patrimonial features. The use of power produces conflict and pathologies. When these serve the legitimate values and interests of participants and actors in the organizational environment, they can have benign consequences. The persistence of patrimonial features, rather than signalling the survival of dysfunctional atavisms, can promote administrative effectiveness by mitigating conflict and promoting organizational loyalty, discipline, and efficiency.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 31 , Issue 2 , January 1979 , pp. 195 - 227
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1979

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References

1 There is an appreciable literature that addresses itself to aspects of this paper. It includes Bendix, Reinhard and Roth, Guenther, Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (Berkeley: University of California Press 1971)Google Scholar; Delany, William, “The Development and Decline of Patrimonial and Bureaucratic Administration,” Administrative Science Quarterly, VIII (Winter 1962–63), 458–501Google Scholar; Fallers, Lloyd, Bantu Bureaucracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1965)Google Scholar; Eisenstadt, S. N., “Traditional Patrimonialism and Modern Neo-Patrimonialism,” in Jackson, J. S., ed., Sociological Studies, Social Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1972)Google Scholar; Diamant, Alfred, “The Bureaucratic Model: Max Weber Rejected, Rediscovered, Resurrected,” in Heady, Ferrel and Stokes, Sybil L., eds., Papers in Comparative Administration (Ann Arbor: Institute of Public Administration, University of Michigan 1962), 59–96Google Scholar; Armstrong, John, “Old Regime Governors: Bureaucratic and Patrimonial Attributes,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, XIV (January 1972), 2–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bendix, Reinhard, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (New York: Doubleday 1960)Google Scholar; Friedrich, Carl J., “Some Observations on Weber's Analysis of Bureaucracy,” in Merton, Robert K. and Associates, Reader in Bureaucracy (New York: Free Press 1952), 27–32Google Scholar; Barker, Ernest, The Development of Public Services in Europe, 1660–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press 1944)Google Scholar; Gladden, E. N., A History oj Public Administration, I, From Earliest Times to the Eleventh Century; II, From the Eleventh Century to the Present Day (London: Frank Cass 1972)Google Scholar; Tout, T. F., Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England, 6 vols. (London: Longmans, Green 1920–1933)Google Scholar; Markoff, John, “Governmental Bureaucratization: General Processes and an Anomalous Case,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, XVII (October 1975)Google Scholar; Beetham, David, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics (London: George Allen and Unwin 1974)Google Scholar; Mommsen, Wolfgang J., The Age of Bureaucracy: Perspectives on the Political Sociology of Max Weber (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1974).Google Scholar Some of these works contain useful bibliographies or bibliographical footnotes.

Weber's anticipation that bureaucracy would triumph historically because it was more efficient and powerful than patrimonial administration and more permanent than charismatic leadership led him to present historical change as an evolutionary process of adaptation which, if not teleological, was at least universal, inevitable, and accessible to human understanding and explanation. Our reading of historical change as it relates to bureaucracy leads us to question Weber's interpretation on a variety of fronts and with a variety of implications. Weber's conceptualization of bureaucracy in terms of rational-legal authority and formal rationality fails to take account of the existence and use of power within and outside of organizations and of the persistence of patrimonial features. The use of power produces conflict and pathologies. What is good for organizations is not necessarily good for their participants or for society: conflict and pathology—when they serve the legitimate values and interests of participants and actors in the organizational environment—can have benign consequences. The persistence of patrimonial features, rather than signalling the survival of dysfunctional atavisms, can promote administrative effectiveness by mitigating conflict and promoting organizational loyalty, discipline, and efficiency.

2 Weber, , The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [hereafter cited as Protestant Ethic] trans, by Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner Library 1958), 13Google Scholar; emphasis in original.

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6 See Rudolph, and Rudolph, , Education and Politics in India: Studies in Organizations, Policy, and Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1972)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 11; The Coordination of Complexity in South Asia, VII, Appendix V of the Report by the Commisson on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy (Murphy Commission) (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office 1975); and (with Singh, Mohan), “A Bureaucratic Lineage in Princely India: Elite Formation and Conflict in a Patrimonial System,” Journal of Asian Studies, XXXIV (May 1975).Google Scholar

7 See Oberschall, Anthony, Empirical Social Research in Germany, 1848–1914 (The Hague: Mouton 1965).Google Scholar In a section on Weber, entitled “A Note on the Non-ideal Type Bureaucracy” (pp. 134–36), Oberschall observes, “It is not generally known that in some of his speeches and little known writings, Weber himself described certain features of bureaucracy which were either not mentioned or in contradiction with his ideal type formulation.” The examples Oberschall provides include the contribution of patrimonial relations and personalism to the administrative effectiveness and efficiency of military hospitals in World War I. Weber himself served as a volunteer and left an “unfinished” report of his experience, available in Weber, Marianne, Max Weber, Ein Lebensbild (Tübingen: Mohr 1926), 545–60.Google Scholar

8 “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics,” in Shils, Edward and Finch, Henry A., trans, and eds., Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press 1949), 42Google Scholar; emphasis in original.

9 “Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences,” ibid., 171.

10 “Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie,” in Weber, Max, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: Mohr 1922), 403Google Scholar; our translation.

11 Protestant Ethic (fn. 2), 49; emphasis added.

12 The relationship of Weber's work to these methodological problems varies greatly. Between two essays, and sometimes within the boundaries of a single essay, he would present generalizations at quite different degrees of abstraction. Thus the discussion of bureaucracy in the essay on types of legitimate domination is relatively more schematic, dogmatic, and insensitive to contrary themes than the same discussion in the essay on bureaucracy. These differences can in part be attributed to the differing intents of the two essays, and to sheer logistical considerations—number of pages. Yet the shorter versions, which obliged him to condense, are a better guide to what, ultimately, he considered critical. By contrast, the numerous caveats, exceptions, and contrary tendencies which he rehearsed in the essay on bureaucracy offer the beginnings of a more complex scheme for handling administration than the patrimonial-bureaucratic diad. It is difficult to evaluate these divergences. Is it to Weber's credit that he recognized so many exceptions? Or is it rather to be deplored that they did not influence his constructs more?

13 Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus, eds., Max Weber. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, 3 vols. (New York: Bedminster Press 1968), 111, 1395.Google Scholar

14 Weber frequently cautioned against the propensity to slide from neutral into normative stances. In his critical review of “energetical” theories of culture, he deplored the prevailing tendency to convert the picture of the world (Weltbild) provided by particular disciplines into a Weltanschauung. See “Energetische Kulturtheorien,” in Weber, , Gesammelte Aujsätze (fn. 10), 377.Google Scholar Yet it is difficult to read the following passage (fn. 3, p. 337), without a sense that more than a model of reality is meant if not intended:

Experience tends universally to show that the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization—that is, the monocratic variety of bureaucracy—is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of carrying out imperative control over human beings. It is superior to any other form in precision, in stability, in the stringency of its discipline, and its reliability. It thus makes possible a particularly high degree of calculability of results for the heads of the organization and for those acting in relation to it. It is finally superior both in intensive efficiency and in the scope of its own operations, and is formally capable of application to all kinds of administrative tasks.

As Friedrich, Carl J. notes (fn. 1, p. 31)Google Scholar, “The very words vibrate with something of a Prussian enthusiasm for the military type of organization and the way seems barred to any kind of consultative, let alone cooperative, pattern. That the latter kind of pattern may be a higher type, that it may represent a ‘more fully developed’ form of administrative organization, not only in terms of humanitarian values, but also in terms of ‘results’ is all but excluded as a possibility.”

15 Nisbet, , Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (New York: Oxford 1969).Google Scholar

16 “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, and Mills, (fn. 4), 215.Google Scholar

17 Roth, and Wittich, (fn. 13), 111Google Scholar, 1394.

18 Thus Tout, referring to 14th-century British administration, is sure that levels of performance and effectiveness were high. For example, record keeping leaves “nothing to be desired in completeness and precision.” Our examination, not yet complete, of the account books of Bedla thikana (estate) in Udaipur, a former princely state, pro duces a similar impression. See T. F. Tout, “The Emergence of Bureaucracy,” in Merton, (fn. 1), 79.Google Scholar

19 Weber in his informal, nonsystematic writing recognized the costs of impersonality. According to Oberschall's discussion of Weber's unfinished report on his experiences as a volunteer in military hospitals during the first year of World War I, Weber attributed the level of convalescing soldiers put under arrest to the lack of a volunteer organization that catered to recreational and non-medical needs not attended to by the professional staff; he found that well-educated volunteer nurses from good social backgrounds were more effective in handling patients than the average professional nurse “because of a varied and individual approach [that attended to] their human and intellectual needs.” Oberschall (fn. 7), 136.

20 “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, and Mills, (fn. 4), 208.Google Scholar

21 Alvin W. Gouldner and Michel Crozier in particular have recognized the problematic nature of power in organizations. See Gouldner, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press 1954). Crozier's formulation of power is cast in terms of how organizational actors attempt to control and manipulate uncertainty and rules. Our formulation focuses on the participants’ use of power (a multidimensional resource differentially and circumstantially available to organizationl actors) in the context of their limited and fluctuating commitments to organizational authority. See Crozier, , The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1964), esp. p. 158.Google Scholar Although we have benefited from Dahrendorf's revitalization of conflict theory, we cannot agree that participants can be understood exclusively in terms of their organizational roles or that conflict can be understood in terms of the zero-sum distribution of authority across roles. Dahrendorf, Ralf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1958).Google Scholar

22 “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, and Mills, (fn. 4), 228–29Google Scholar; emphasis in original. Although there are strong consensual implications in Weber's bureaucratic theory, in light of much of his other work he more properly belongs with “conflict theory.” His sociology of religion, for example, grounds ideology in the world view of competing status orders.

Bertolt Brecht created a scene in The Caucasian Chalk Circle which illustrates the highest hopes for bureaucratic role internalization. A corporal attempting to recapture the withdrawn affect of an unmilitary-looking footsoldier reluctantly committed to warlike behavior, exhorts him to exhibit organizational zeal: “When you hear a command, you should get a hard-on; when you thrust your sword, you should come.” (Revised English version by Eric Bentley.)

23 Protestant Ethic (fn. 2), 182.

24 “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, and Mills, (fn. 4), 232–33.Google Scholar

25 According to Weber, bureaucracy becomes “an instrument for “societalizing” relations of power” when it becomes “the means of carrying ‘community action’ over into rationally ordered ‘societal action.’” Ibid., 228.

26 Robert Blauner’s dimensions of alienation supply another account of these areas of conflict; see Blauner, , Alienation and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1964).Google Scholar

27 We do not mean to suggest that the issues beneath such conflicts are lacking in independent validity.

28 March, James G. and Simon, Herbert A., Organizations (New York: Wiley 1958)Google Scholar; Ilchman, Warren and Dhar, Trilok, “Optimal Ignorance and Excessive Education: Educational Inflation in India,” Asian Survey, XI (January 1971), 523–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 Allison, Graham T., Essence of Decision (Boston: Little, Brown 1971)Google Scholar; Ralf Dahrendorf (fn. 21); Etzioni, Amitai, A Comparative Analysis of Complex Organizations (New York: Free Press 1975)Google Scholar; Crozier (fn. 21).

30 Because conflict often arises out of struggles against alienation or exploitation and for autonomy or equity, conflict may be judged as desirable when weighed against the benefits of efficiency and social order that congruence makes possible.

31 “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, and Mills, (fn. 4), 231.Google Scholar

32 Carl J. Friedrich develops at some length the proposition that administrative staffs cannot be understood apart from the environments to which they are responsible (“responsible bureaucracy”); see Constitutional Government and Democracy (Boston: Little, Brown; various editions), chap. XIX. For a graphic account of relations between a bureaucratic agency and its clientèle and other environments, see Maass, Arthur A., Muddy Waters: The Army Engineers and the Nation's Rivers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1951).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

33 John Kenneth Galbraith has done much to restore some balance in the under standing of economic behavior by suggesting how much of it relies on political rather than “economic” motivation; see Economics and the Public Purpose (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1973).

34 “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, and Mills, (fn. 4), 224.Google Scholar

35 Ibid., 231.

36 Ibid., 237.

37 Ibid., 238–39.

38 Ibid., 239.

39 Ibid., 237–38.

Here and elsewhere, Weber anticipated recent work on state corporatism. For an interpretation of interest groups in the context of state and liberal (or societal) corporatism, see three articles in Comparative Political Studies, X (April 1977): Philippe Schmitter, “Modes of Interest Intermediation and Models of Societal Change in Western Europe,” pp. 7–37; Panitch, Leo, “The Development of Corporatism in Liberal Democracies,” pp. 61–90Google Scholar; and Lehmbruch, Gerhard, “Liberal Corporatism and Party Government,” pp. 91–122Google Scholar; also see earlier, Schmitter's “Still the Century of Corporatism,” Review of Politics, XXXVI (January 1974), 85–131.Google Scholar

The literature on interest-group pluralism is critically evaluated in David Greenstone, J., “Group Theories,” in Greenstein, Fred and Polsby, Nelson, eds., The Handbook of Political Science, 11 (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley 1975), 243–318.Google Scholar

40 “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, and Mills, (fn. 4), 237–38.Google Scholar German banks and bankers continue to play a critical role in investment decisions of firms and industries as members of boards of directors and apex bodies’ governing committees. See Shonfield, Andrew, Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public and Private Power (New York: Oxford University Press 1969), chap, XI, 239–64.Google Scholar

41 “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, and Mills, (fn. 4), 239.Google Scholar

42 Roth, and Wittich, (fn. 13), 111Google Scholar, 1394; emphasis in original.

43 “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, and Mills, (fn. 4), 239.Google Scholar

44 Aspects of these phenomena are dealt with, inter alia, in Halperin, Morton H., Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution 1974)Google Scholar; Wise, David, The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (New York: Random House 1973)Google Scholar; Seidman, Harold, Politics, Position, and Power: The Dynamics of Federal Organization (2d ed., New York: Oxford University Press 1976)Google Scholar; and Heclo, Hugh, A Government of Strangers: Executive Politics in Washington (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution 1977).Google Scholar

45 See Rudolph, and Rudolph, , “A Bureaucratic Lineage in Princely India” (fn. 6).Google Scholar

46 We are tempted to use the word neopatrimonialism when examining how personal authority, personalism, particularism, and appropriation can close the gap between power and authority in modern bureaucratic contexts, and we shall occasionally do so. Such usage raises theoretical difficulties because it bears the imprint of the very dichotomy we are attempting to revise. Daniel Edwards suggests that there may be problems to employing the word patrimonialism in modern contexts because of the intellectual baggage it carries. Our decision to use it is based on the belief that a rhetorical device of this kind will break through the persistent belief that “patrimonial” features have a traditional location only. See Edwards's, “Bureaucracy in Nepal: Developments in Administration from the Rana Years to Present,” Ph.D. diss. (Department of Political Science, University of Chicago 1977).Google Scholar

47 For this concept and its application, see Etzioni (fn. 29), chaps, XII and XIII.

48 See, for example, Rosenberg, Hans, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy (Boston: Beacon Press 1958).Google Scholar

49 “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, and Mills, (fn. 4), 228Google Scholar; emphasis added.

50 Weber was, on the one hand, emphatic that bureaucracy furthers the specialist at the expense of the “cultivated man.” “The modern development of full bureaucratization brings the system of rational, specialized and expert examinations irresistibly to the fore.” Ibid., 241. On the other hand, he qualified his main assertion empirically without letting the qualification either weaken the dominant theme or break it into a multifaceted generalization: “Expert examinations are neither indispensable to nor concomitant phenomena of bureaucratization. The French, English and American bureaucracies have for a long time foregone such examinations entirely or to a large extent, for training and service in party organizations have made up for them.” Ibid., 240.

51 Ibid., 211.

52 Roth, and Wittich, (fn. 13), 1398Google Scholar; “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, and Mills, (fn. 4), 211.Google Scholar

53 Ibid., 225.

54 Shefter, , “The Emergence of the Political Machine: An Alternative View,” in Hawley, Willis and Lipsky, Michael, eds., Theoretical Perspectives on Urban Politics (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall 1978).Google Scholar

55 See aspects of Katznelson's, City Trenches (New York: PantheonGoogle Scholar, forthcoming).

56 “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, and Mills, (fn. 4), 224–25.Google Scholar Weber identified two principles that distinguished political parties in modern states—“organizations for job patronage” [Weber's emphasis], which he associated with the United States and attributed to the absence of a parliamentary system, and ideological parties (Weltanschauung sparteien), oriented to the realization of “substantive [Weber's emphasis] political ideals,” which he associated with continental parties, pre-eminently the German Social Democratic Party. Poor state management of the economy by dilettanti could be tolerated in the United States “in view of the limitless abundance of economic opportunities. The increasing necessity of replacing the untrained party protégé and sometime-official with the technically trained career official diminishes progressively the parties’ benefices and results inescapably in a bureaucracy of the European kind.” Whether, when, or to what degree the conditions mentioned by Weber have changed are open questions. His observation that “despite the resulting corruption [of patronage appointments] this system was popular [in the United States] since it prevented the rise of a bureaucratic caste” suggests at a minimum that bureaucracy in the United States was not and has not become “of the European kind.” Roth, and Wittich, (fn. 13), 1397–98.Google Scholar

57 Alvin Gouldner, “On Weber's Analysis of Bureaucratic Rules,” in Merton, (fn. 1, p. 48)Google Scholar, briefly attends to the contradiction between multiple historical manifestations of bureaucracy and its common features. John Markoff's characterization of theories of the causes of bureaucracy since Weber's time also makes the case for autonomous and plural explanations, in “Governmental Bureaucratization …” (fn. 1); see p. 480 for his summary.

58 Parsons, (fn. 3), 338.Google Scholar

59 Weber did attend to the contradictions between democracy and bureaucracy and capitalism when he observed that democracy tries to prevent the development of “closed status groups in the interest of a universal accessibility of office,” when it tries to minimize “the authority of officialdom in the interests of expanding the sphere of ‘public opinion’ …,” and when it attempts to make “a clean sweep of …—at least in intent—the plutocratic privileges in administration.” “Bureaucracy,” in Gerth, and Mills, (fn. 4), 226Google Scholar and 225.

60 Roth, and Wittich, (fn. 13), 1465Google Scholar; emphasis in original.

61 There is, of course, an extensive literature on leadership in administration, some of which is relevant to our prospective analysis. Among the most influential writers are Barnard, Chester, The Functions of the Executive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1938)Google Scholar, and Selznick, Philip, Leadership in Administration (Evanston, 111.: Row, Peterson 1957).Google Scholar

62 Etzioni, (fn. 47, chaps, XIIGoogle Scholar and XIII) argues that “personal (or pure) charisma may be originally achieved in organizational offices” (p. 307; emphasis in original).

63 Brower, Brock, “McNamara Seen Now, Full Length,” Life (May 10, 1968).Google Scholar All subsequent citations on McNamara are from this article.

64 The term “whiz kid” passed into colloquial usage as “Whiz Kid. Slang. A youth ful and exceptionally successful or intelligent executive, agent or advisor.” Random House Dictionary of the English Language (Unabridged Edition 1967).

65 For a favorable view of Presidential efforts to control and direct the foreign-policy bureaucracy through penetrating and colonizing executive agencies with Presidential loyalists and team players, see Destler, I. M., Presidents, Bureaucrats, and Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1974).Google Scholar For a critical view and suggestions for alternative modes of coordination, see Rudolph and Rudolph, The Coordination of Complexity in South Asia (fn. 6). The peril to the nation is featured in Reedy, George, The Twilight of the Presidency (New York: World Publishing Company 1970)Google Scholar, and Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr, The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifffin 1973).Google ScholarHeclo's, HughA Government of Strangers (fn. 44)Google Scholar assumes a critical stance toward the President-centered interpretations of the leadership and coordination requirements of the executive branch, such as Neustadt's, RichardPresidential Power: The Politics of Leadership With Reflections on Johnson and Nixon (New York: Wiley 1976).Google Scholar