The term “bureaucracy” has never been so precisely defined than in the writings of Max Weber. Such precision results in a useful and enduring conceptualization of the term. This paper examines four essential characteristics of Weber’s ideal type bureaucracy; defining them and their technical advantages in the context of certain overarching sociological trends. These trends are impersonality, ef...

Bureaucracy is a central component in many important debates in organization theory. First suggested as a way to efficiently manage organizations that would replace favouritism and partiality with clear, transparent rules (Weber, 1922), the growth of bureaucracy was seen to lead to the domination of ‘rational matter of factness’ (Weber, 1922; 240). Since its inception, bureaucracy has been inte...

Reports of the demise of the bureaucratic form of organization are greatly exaggerated, and debates about bureaucracy’s functions and effects therefore persist. For many years, a broad current of organizational scholarship has taken inspiration from Weber’s image of bureaucracy as an “iron cage” and has seen bureaucracy as profoundly ambivalent – imposing alienation as the price of efficiency. ...

Kurt Lewin famously proclaimed, “There is nothing so practical as good theory”, signifying that a good theory lends itself to being applied in a variety of contexts. This paper uses the lens of Max Weber’s theory of bureaucracy to examine contemporary EGovernment related research and literature. Two major, prevailing themes emerge from this exercise. The first theme that emerges is that IT (inf...

The management literature is presenting a most critical view of the bureaucratic organization form as what is essentially incapable of responding to external changes and providing meaningful work assignment for its co-workers. This negative image of bureaucracy is largely taken for granted and are only occasionally supported by empirical evidence. This paper presents a study of how co-workers i...

the purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of bureaucratic structure on the employee engagement (ee). our study extends previous researches by considering bureaucracy from two points of view: enabling versus hindering. we study the extent to which these two types of bureaucracy are related to the two forms of employee engagement: organizational (oe) and work engagement (we). the vie...