Bureaucracy, Power, and Control: Weber vs. Foucault

Introduction: Bureaucracy and Its Reputation

The word "bureaucracy" typically carries a negative connotation for many Americans. The immediate reaction for most people is to characterize any agency described in this way as slow, outmoded, and inefficient. Lipsky (2010) indicates that bureaucracies often appear to channel certain prejudices that are inherent in biased systems. This impression is, however, largely a product of the quality of the governmental umbrella under which a given bureau operates. The bureaucracy as a form of government, such as we have in the United States, bears certain virtues of effectiveness that may not be found in its absence. From the capacity for procedural standardization to the specialized but interconnected areas of focus spread across a diversity of cooperative agencies, the bureaucracy is the segment of government with the capacity to attend to the minutiae of public administration while still exerting a substantial influence over policy direction.

This view is endorsed by Downs (1964), who 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.

In our efforts to understand the way that bureaucracy inclines power dynamics toward 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 how bureaucracy shapes the power dynamics underlying our present form of government.

Weber's Rational-Legal Domination

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 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 point is further demonstrated by primary Weber sources. According to Weber's (1919) Politics as a Vocation, the relationship between 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 meaningful 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.

Foucault's Carceral Society and the Panopticon

The carceral organizational theory described by Foucault casts these roles in an entirely contrary light. Foucault expresses the idea that modern society and culture have altered considerably the way in which 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 throughout history. But Foucault warns that this withdrawal has produced a different mode of authoritarianism altogether — one that has persisted in unraveling the individuality, privacies, and entitlements that were once 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; urban planning (organized on a grid structure to facilitate movement but also to discourage concealment); hospital and factory architecture; and so on" (Felluga, p. 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. Where Weber places the public in a position of authority over government bureaucracies, Foucault instead places the bureaucracy in a position of utmost authority. In a sense, this is the far-reaching arm of government which keeps the public at a distance from its leadership. This creates a dynamic of power and dependency that Foucault refers to as the Panopticon. As Felluga summarizes, "the Panopticon is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, 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, p. 1).

This is the vision of bureaucracy that Meier (1993) engages in his analysis of current public policy and the political process. In his primer on America's multi-agency civil administration structure, Meier reintroduces his reader to the bureaucracy as a functional model for policy enforcement by contextualizing it through familiar examples of American governmental effectiveness and by categorizing its centrality within the varied appendages of a massive administrative enterprise — namely, the maintenance of the operational order of the United States.

Conclusion: Power, Dependency, and the Social Contract

Through the present discussion of the various elements that combine to formulate a bureaucratic government, we can remove the purely negative connotation from the notion of bureaucracy. However, this is only supplanted by a neutral understanding of bureaucracy as a necessary and inevitable set of functional appendages designed to carry out the complicated business of the people. These appendages implicate both the government and the people in an agreement over power dynamics in which the latter have essentially vested their trust, their labor support, their public funding, and their dependency in the former.

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