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Bureaucracy and Organization

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Bureaucracy and Organization
JOKO1102 Introduction to Management and Organization
Bureaucracy

Fabrizio Bertoglio fbertogl@ulapland.fi (Numbers of words 6952)

Introduction
As Etzioni puts it “we are born in organisations, educated by organizations, and most of us spend much of our lives working for organisations”.
This simple sentence let us understand the importance of bureaucracy in our daily life and the reason that push me to study them.
I’ve been interested in it and decided to more deeply study the characteristic of this type of organizations, interest that drive me in writing this essay. The writing was constantly following my research of information, this give to my essay the following structure:
1. HISTORICAL OUTLOOK
2. DEFINITION OF BUREAUCRACY AND MAIN CHARACTERISTIC
3. THE CLASSICAL APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF BUREAUCRACY: Weber Political Sociology
4. CONCLUSION ON WEBER
5. BUREAUCRATIZATION AND RATIONALIZATION: INTO THE IRON CAGE
6. THE POST-WEBERIAN THEORIES OF BUREAUCRACY: Taylorism
7. SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT AND THE MCDONALD CASE
8. THE HUMAN RELATION SCHOOL
9. TOWARDS A BROADENING SCOPE
The structure of my essay follow different theories of organization, each of them found numerous advantages or disadvantages of certain system. I will deeply them and end with a general conclusion.

1 HISTORICAL OUTLOOK
Bureaucracy is nowadays a terms associated with a negative meaning. The word is often utilized to describe inefficient organisation incapable to take rapid decision, costly and paralyzed by their complex system of work. In few words a “clock-work-orange” moving a lot of gears in a synchronized manner, but producing no movement at all.
It has not always been like that, on the opposite the bureaucratic system was introduced by Napoleon for the exact opposite reason.
Decisions had to be taken, also in the huge macro system of the national state French organisation:
• Within the state legal system,
• Within a hierarchical organisation,
• With


References: A GENERAL THEORY OF BUREAUCRACY Elliot Jaques 1981 Heinemann ORGANIZATION AND BUREAUCRACY Nicos P. Mouzelis 1975 International Library of Sociology edited by John Rex THE MCDONALDIZATION OF SOCIETY George Ritzer 1992 Pine Forge Press
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