Bureaucracy power in various institutions

Bureaucracy According to Weber and Foucault

The word 'bureaucracy' typically carries with it a negative connotation to many Americans. The immediate reaction for most is to characterize an agency described thusly as slow, outmoded and inefficient. Lipsky (2010) indicates that bureaucracies often appear to channel certain prejudices that are inherent biased systems. This is, however, an impression fostered by the quality of the governmental umbrella under which a bureau operates. The bureaucracy as a form of government itself, as we have in the United States, bears certain virtues of effectiveness that may not be found in their absence. From the capacity for procedural standardization to the specialized but interceding areas of focus for a diversity of cooperative agencies, the bureaucracy is the segment of our government with the capacity to attend to the minutiae of public administration while still levying a substantial influence over policy direction. This view is endorsed in the report by Downs (1964), which points out that "not only do bureaus provide employment for a very significant fraction of the world's population. . .. But also they make critical decisions which shape the economic, political, social, and even moral lives of nearly everyone on earth." (Downs, p. 1) Indeed, the bureaucracy is the very unit upon which power is formulated in the United States, with the bulk of treasury resources designated for public use being distributed through these channels.

Argument:

In our efforts to understand the way that bureaucracy inclines power dynamics to both positive and negative ends, we consider the views of civic philosophers Max Weber and Michel Foucault. Their respective views on bureaucracy help to inform a more balanced understanding of bureaucracy as it shapes the power dynamics underlying our present form of government.

Discussion:

For his part, Weber discusses bureaucracy as aligning with the notion of Rational-Legal Domination. This suggests that the mechanisms defining modern governance are shaped according to practical functionality and their capacity to execute the many complex duties imposed upon the various agencies of public office. As the text by Olsen (2005), indicates, this is essential to our understanding of bureaucratic necessity. Olsen reports that "bureaucratic organization is part of a repertoire of overlapping, supplementary, and competing forms coexisting in contemporary democracies, and so are market-organization and network-organization. Rediscovering Weber's analysis of bureaucratic organization, then, enriches our understanding of public administration." (Olsen, p. 1)

This is further demonstrated by primary Weber accounts. According to Weber's (1919) Politics as a Vocation, the relationship enjoyed between the notions of rationality and legality is a matter of necessity for the sound and stable maintenance of the nation-state. This combines the logical expectations of the public with the consent to allow its government to govern. Weber explains that "there is domination by virtue of 'legality,' by virtue of the belief in the validity of legal statute and functional 'competence' based on rationally created rules. In this case, obedience is expected in discharging statutory obligations. This is domination as exercised by the modern 'servant of the state' and by all those bearers of power who in this respect resemble him." (p. 1)

Here, Weber speaks of those engaged in the business of government bureaucracy as being subject to the authority of the public in a sense. The expectation that the material realities of governance and tax collection will be manifested in the performance of its duties is said to behold the state or federal agency. The carceral organizational theory described by Foucault, however, casts these roles to exactly the contrary. Here, Foucault expresses the idea that our society and culture have altered considerably the way that we relate to our government. In one sense, modern governments have been required to withdraw from many of the more barbaric and violent modes of legal enforcement that were common through history. But Foucault warns that this has wrought a different mode of authoritarianism altogether that has persisted in unraveling the individuality, privacies and entitlements that have often been used to justify such brutality. Felluga (2002) reports that "by carceral culture, Foucault refers to a culture in which the panoptic model of surveillance has been diffused as a principle of social organization, affecting such disparate things as the university classroom (see right for a prison school that resembles some classroom auditoriums); urban planning (organized on a grid structure to facilitate movement but also to discourage concealment); hospital and factory architecture; and so on." (Felluga, 1)

This is to suggest that in our increasing dependence on a benevolent system of governmentally regulated agencies and organizations, we have increasingly ceded our individuality in favor of the broader mechanisms of government, state and nation. Here, where Weber has placed the public in a position of authority over government bureaucracies, Foucault has instead placed the bureaucracy in a position of utmost authority. In a sense, this is the far-reaching arm of the government which keeps the public apart from its leadership. This creates a dynamic of power and dependency that Foucault refers to as the Panopticon. Here, "as Foucault puts it, the Panopticon is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoner, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons." (Felluga, 1)

This is the bureaucracy which Meier (1993) speaks of in his analysis of current public policy and the political process. In his primer on the subject of America's multi-agency civil administration structure, the public policy professor re-introduces his reader to the bureaucracy as a functional model for policy-enforcement by contextualizing it according to some familiar examples of American governmental effectiveness and by categorizing its centricity in the variant appendages of a massive administrative responsibility such as maintaining the operational order of the United States.

Accordingly, Meier submits that the negative regard for which the 'bureaucratic agency' -- as a generic term for a procedurally inflexible, impersonal and disenfranchising governmental organization -- is a misapprehension of both the meaning of bureaucracy and the causes of agency shortcomings. To the contrary of this impression, he argues that a well-run bureaucratic agency will rather be the most accessible entry point to contact with one's government at the municipal, state or city level. Hired civilian employees function through these agencies as extremities of the policy aims of the officials we collectively elect. Thus, these agencies might be considered our liaison to those in public office. This elucidates a relationship which is crucial to understanding the way that the bureaucracy works and what factors impact its level of efficiency. The author explains that the bureaucracy operates according to its best levels of proficiency when it possesses both the 'autonomy' and the 'resources' in simultaneity to accomplish its goals. (Meier, p.13)

With the goals defined by legislative intent, autonomy nonetheless grants the agency to use internally sensitive methods of discernment to shape procedure, to streamline its policy approach and to implement policy according to its understanding of public opinion, established best-practices or even innovative new perspectives on agency responsibilities. These independent functions are seen, according to Niskanen, as the mechanisms by which the state's interests relate to those of the individual. According to Niskanen, "most of the literature on bureaucracy, from Confucius to Weber, proceeds from an organic concept of the state, that is, a concept of a state for which the preferences of individuals are subordinate to certain organic goals of the state." (Niskanen, p. 5)

This is consistent with our reading on Weber's ideas, suggesting that the bureaucratic agency will ultimately attend to its responsibilities because its continuing survivability and the survivability of the form of government which it legitimizes will depend upon it. Accordingly, Weber tells that "to maintain a dominion by force, certain material goods are required, just as with an economic organization. All states may be classified according to whether they rest on the principle that the staff of men themselves own the administrative means, or whether the staff is 'separated' from these means of administration. This distinction holds in the same sense in which today we say that the salaried employee and the proletarian in the capitalistic enterprise are 'separated' from the material means of production. The power-holder must be able to count on the obedience of the staff members, officials, or whoever else they may be." (Weber, p. 1)

This obedience must occur at the bureaucratic level and must be demonstrated by the functionality of the agency without the constant attention of the executive offices of government.

It is crucial that in conjunction with this hands-off approach, the legislative and executive branches reinforce their confidence in the orientation of such agencies and the practicability of their legislation by endowing such organizations with the proper range of resources necessary to carry out initiatives and responsibilities with efficiency. Such resources will include proper funding for facilities, personnel, technological and communicational resources and other such elements required for an administrative capacity congruent with the needs of the public which it is designed to serve.

It is thus that the bulk of Meier's book concerns the actual structure of a government based on the principle of bureaucracy. Here, he explores in detail the relationship between a variant of agencies and the way in which these help to maintain the sensible interaction of the government's three demarcated branches. Though he refers to it as the fourth branch in the title of his book, he nonetheless appears to illustrate in this chapter that bureaucracy is instead the versatile membrane transmitting communication and action amidst the multifarious responsibilities of the federal administration. In this regard, the Meier text comes ultimately to confirm the major claims of Foucault, which suggest a reciprocity between our selective dependency upon the functionality of bureaucratic agencies and the solidified power of the state. Here, "Foucalut's studies of the hospital, prison, and school, in addition to accounts of the factory system by Marx and recent social historians, ground Weberian formal analysis in the history of various social techniques for the administration of corporeal, attitudinal and behavioral discipline, i.e., the disciplinary society." (O'Neill, 42)

In this regard, we can see that the rational-legal argument posed by Weber would actually form the basis for the power dynamics predicted by Foucault through the modernization of governments. A prime representation of this theorem is Meier's discussion on the presidential and congressional political bureaus, which are essentially actionable vehicles through which these separate branches can affect policy on a single issue. This dynamic is further supported by Prendergast (2007), who reports that the bureaucracy must inherently favor the state over the individual in order to conduct the business of the state. Thus, Prendergast states that "bureaucrats should be biased. Second, sometimes this bias takes the form of advocating for their clients more than would their principal, while in other cases, they are more hostile to their interests. For a range of bureaucracies, those who are biased against clients lead to more efficient outcomes." (Prendergast, p. 180)

An important feature of bureaucracy which is considered here is its capacity to assign civilian employees to conduct responsibilities that, in detail, specialization and even tediousness, may fall outside the purview of time available to busy public officials. In this regard, presidential administrations and senatorial committees alike may appeal to such agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Motor Vehicles to execute mutual legislative initiatives. This indicates that political and bureaucratic figures serve different functions within the same power structure, according to Alesina & Tabellini (2008). The argue that "politicians are preferable if there is uncertainty about social preferences and flexibility is valuable, or if policy complementarities and compensation of losers is important. Bureaucrats are preferable if time inconsistency and short-termism is an issue, or if vested interests have large stakes in the policy outcome." (Alesina & Tabellini, p. 426)

Here, the authors discusses the role of the civilian workforce in the elected government's many bureaucracies, evaluating such agencies as essentially the means through which the prodigious responsibilities of our elected officials are delegated to the citizens themselves. When discussing the civilian corps, Meier makes the case that this is an ultimate demonstration of democracy in action, with said civilians even bearing the capacity to shape policy directly. This is possible, Meier indicates, when an agency is seen as favorable to the citizenry by the population itself. Such a reputation is earned for efficiency, expediency, accessibility and a general fostering of the impression that the agency genuinely is designed to bring policy and public into direct contact with one another. This participatory level of involvement with the government is a prime determinant of the so-called disciplinary society, with members of the society itself acting as limbs of a greater system of authority by consenting to its continuity. Ouchi (1980) explains the phenomenon, reporting that "an organization will exist so long as it can offer its members inducements which exceed the contributions is asks of them." (Ouchi, 129)