Sidebar: Max Weber beyond the routinization of charisma..from Wikipedia

[Mark Kohut]

Thus he alludes to an inevitable move towards a rational-legal structure of authority, utilising a bureaucratic structure.[45] Thus this theory can be sometimes viewed as part of the social evolutionism theory. This ties to his broader concept of rationalisation by suggesting the inevitability of a move in this direction.

Weber is also well-known for his critical study of the bureaucratisation of society, the rational ways in which formal social organizations apply the ideal type characteristics of a bureaucracy. It was Weber who began the studies of bureaucracy and whose works led to the popularization of this term.[46] Many aspects of modern public administration go back to him, and a classic, hierarchically organised civil service of the Continental type is called "Weberian civil service", although this is only one ideal type of public administration and government described in his magnum opus Economy and Society (1922), and one that he did not particularly like himself – he only thought it particularly efficient and successful. In this work, Weber outlines a description, which has become famous, of rationalization (of which bureaucratization is a part) as a shift from a value-oriented organisation and action (traditional authority and charismatic authority) to a
 goal-oriented organization and action (legal-rational authority). The result, according to Weber, is a "polar night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalization of human life traps individuals in an "iron cage" of rule-based, rational control.[47] Weber's bureaucracy studies also led him to his analysis – correct, as it would turn out, after Stalin's takeover – that socialism in Russia would lead to over-bureaucratization rather than to the "withering away of the state" (as Karl Marx had predicted would happen in communist society).[48]


[edit] Weber's Definition of Bureaucracies