Bureaucracy Is Anything But Impersonal
Max Weber, the German sociologist, wrote about bureaucracy. His theoretical framework for understanding bureaucracy is understood better as a set of hopeful assumptions. Over time, for many, these assumptions have become beliefs, as if they are a factual description of the way in which these systems work.
Here is a summary of the six characteristics of bureaucracy:
1. Task specialisation (Specialization and Division of Labor)
2. Hierarchical layers of authority
3. Formal selection
4. Rules and requirements
5. Impersonal (Impersonality and Personal Indifference)
6. Career orientation
Reading the article’s explanation of the meaning of these six items, one is struck by their quaint innocence. It’s as if the author was a visitor from another world with no knowledge of immutable human nature. It is the description of a fanciful mechanical system in which the cogs of the machine are made of flesh and bone.
The last two characteristics are downright charming:
“5. Impersonal
“Regulations and clear requirements create distant and impersonal relationships between employees, with the additional advantage of preventing nepotism or involvement from outsiders or politics. These impersonal relationship are a prominent feature of bureaucracies.
“Interpersonal relationships are solely characterised by a system of public law and rules and requirements. Official views are free from any personal involvement, emotions and feelings. Decisions are solely made on the basis of rational factors, rather than personal factors.
“6. Career orientation
“Employees of a bureaucratic organisation are selected on the basis of their expertise. This helps in the deployment of the right people in the right positions and thereby optimally utilising human capital.
“In a bureaucracy, it is possible to build a career on the basis of experience and expertise. As a result, it offers lifetime employment.”
“The right division of labour within a bureaucratic organisation also allows employees to specialise themselves further, so that they may become experts in their own field and significantly improve their performance.
Weber assumes away any friction. There are no office politics in a bureaucracy, so it is meritocratic in the extreme. People in bureaucracies are all subject matter experts; there is no variability based upon talent, personality, or drive. There is a perfect allocation of resources in which people are allocated to the ideal role, given their skillset. There is no possibility of external political influence. The bureaucracy exists to implement and enforce the rules that define the organization.
Here’s my favorite:
“Decisions are solely made on the basis of rational factors, rather than personal factors.”
This is fantasy, on its face.
What would it look like if the opposite of Weber’s assertions were true?
People would leverage their position in bureaucracies for personal gain or for political influence far in excess of their station.
Kind of like this:
“More than 500 political appointees and staff members representing some 40 government agencies sent a letter to President Biden on Tuesday protesting his support of Israel in its war in Gaza.”
Leaders and other staff members in the federal bureaucracy feel that they have the right to exercise opinions about policy and to influence its creation. So much for saying that decisions are made “free from personal involvement, emotions, and feelings.”
What’s worse is that these letters are signed anonymously.
‘The signatories of the letter submitted on Tuesday and the one circulating among USAID employees are anonymous, the USAID letter explains, out of “concern for our personal safety and risk of potentially losing our jobs.”’
There used to be a norm in government. Officials, elected and unelected, who disagreed with a policy personally would resign their position. The purpose of this practice is to ensure accountability and the integrity of the system. Mistakes have consequences.
“This means that if waste, corruption, or any other misbehaviour is found to have occurred within a ministry, the minister is responsible even if the minister had no knowledge of the actions. A minister is ultimately responsible for all actions by a ministry because, even without knowledge of an infraction by subordinates, the minister approved the hiring and continued employment of those civil servants. If misdeeds are found to have occurred in a ministry, the minister is expected to resign.”
While this language describes the responsibility at the Ministerial level, in the Weberian ideal, the principle should cascade to leadership in the civil service, especially if they are willing to attach their names to a public criticism of elected officials executing their duties within their rights. It is the honorable thing to do. Now, it seems to exist only in television reruns.
Over time, the notion of accountability has evolved into something archaic. Where Weber writes about the opportunity to build a career based on the rational application of expertise, the current situation resembles a careerist self-interest, leveraging the resources and prestige of an office to advance personal agendas.
If the bureaucracy is unwilling or unable to carry out the strategy their governing leadership (in the form of politicians elected to office) have decided upon, then the real seat of power transitions from the people to a coterie of apparatchiks. If bureaucrats aren’t willing to risk their personal careers on matters of principle by resigning and taking on an uncertain future employment path (perhaps because they don’t feel the imperative to do so), then the institutions rot from within. We lose faith in them. It’s as if the bureaucrats raid the institution’s political and reputational capital for their own benefit, embezzling legitimacy.
This is what the phrase “deep state” captures. It is also why the phrase is so contentious.
Here’s the geopolitical strategist George Friedman:
“The deep state is, in fact, a very real thing. It is, however, neither a secret nor nearly as glamorous as the concept might indicate. It has been in place since 1871 and continues to represent the real mechanism beneath the federal government, controlling and frequently reshaping elected officials’ policies. This entity is called the civil service, and it was created to limit the power of the president.
“Prior to 1871, the president could select federal employees. He naturally selected loyalists who would do his bidding. Occasionally, he also would hire people as a political favor to solidify his base. And on occasion, he or one of his staff would sell positions to those who wanted them for a host of reasons, frequently to make money from the positions they were given.”
All of which prior behavior conflicts with Weber’s assertion of the impartial, rules-based rationality of administrative actors. The before picture is just a different version of disappointing the ideal.
“The issue is not that there is a deep government, but that the deep government is no secret. It was created with the purpose of limiting presidential power, and in part, the will of the people. In separating politics from administration, the creation of the civil service weakened the political system and strengthened the administrative one. That is what was quite openly intended.
“There is a layer of employees in the turbulent boundary who have ambitions far beyond their jobs. This layer of employees, particularly those approaching retirement, also exists in the independent agencies. The former are bright young men and women who wreak havoc with ambition; the latter are men and women who have spent their careers struggling to do their jobs against a political system they regard as incapable of understanding what they do. This is natural given that they also have spent their careers making what they do mysterious and incomprehensible. As they age, they become more conservative (in the sense of preserving what is) and see themselves as the guardians of ancient verities. They frequently face a president who believes that the experts are the problem, not the solution.”
The deep state is an artefact of the mistrust of democracy stemming from 19th century experience. The deep state is at odds with governance. It is a mechanism for the expression of ambition, something that is personal by definition.
The Principal-Agent Rule: Many of the people who staff bureaucracies, especially at the highest levels of leadership, act in their own personal interest, seeking to control the levers of power and to express views of policy that belong rightly to political leadership.
The principal-agent problem in economics refers to a company, though here we argue it applies just as well to an administrative agency.
The principal is the owner (or set of owners of the company). Think of them as the shareholders. Shareholders elect a Board of Directors to oversee the operation of the company on their behalf.
The agent is the set of executives who run the company, doing the bidding of the Board. If the Board says that the company should expand into Asia, the role of the agent is to salute and make it happen.
To make their decisions, the principal requires information and influence. The agent can control the governance process by controlling both of these things. If the agent doesn’t think that pivoting to Asia is a good idea, then the agent could filter the information the Board sees in such a way as to persuade the Board that the Company should stick to its geographic knitting, or the agent could slow-walk the implementation of the Board’s recommendation, delaying any expansion in the East to the point of meaninglessness.
How often does this kind of manipulation take place where there is bureaucracy, whatever the corporate form?
Who has the power?