Bureaucracy

Casler, C; Pierides, D

doi:10.4337/9781800377721.00015

Bureaucracy

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Dean Pierides ORCiD

Downloads

Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.

Abstract

Bureaucracy is an organisational form that functions according to written rules and procedures, impersonally and uniformly applied through a hierarchy of authority that can continue to exist through the positions and roles that it establishes by legal means, beyond the individuals who temporarily occupy them at any given time. It is these characteristics, amongst others, that have enabled organisations as diverse as professionalised firms and the civil service to emerge and expand as bureaucratic organisations from the twentieth century onward. Bureaucracy remains a central feature of most advanced societies, as well as a central feature of all complex organisations and their management. It continues to be a central term in the vocabulary of critical management studies.