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Bureaucracy as per Weber is simply 'rationally organized action'. It dominates because this is the appropriate way to manage hundreds of thousands of people in

Bureaucracy as per Weber is simply 'rationally organized action'. It dominates because this is the appropriate way to manage hundreds of thousands of people in a impersonal, rule based and meritocratic way. Third world countries work the other way around, they don't have professional bureaucracies, they only have clans and families. It's not ossified but efficient. If a company like Google with about ~180.000 employees were to make decisions by everyone talking to everyone else you can try to do the math on what the complexity of that is.

agos 2y ago
effective, maybe. efficient... I would not be so sure.
- yazaddaruvala 2y ago
  Depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Small organizations define efficiency based on time to make number go up/down. Meanwhile, if something bad happens at 2am and no one wakes up - whatever there we’re likely no customers impacted. Larger organizations are really efficient at ensuring the p10 (ie worst) hires are not able to cause any real damage. Every other thing about the org is set up to most cost effectively ensure least damage. Meanwhile, numbers should also go up is a secondary priority.
dbspin 2y ago
Bureaucracies are certainly impersonal, but you'd be at a loss to find one that's genuinely rule based and meritocratic. To the extent that they become remain rule based they are no longer effective and get routed around. To the extent that they're meritocratic, the same thing happens with networks of influence. Once you get high enough, or decentralised enough bureaucracies work like any other human tribes. Bureaucracies may sometimes be effective ways to cut down on nepotism (although they manifestly fail at that in my country), but they're machines for manifesting cronyism.
openrisk 2y ago
> It's not ossified but efficient. These are just assertions. Efficient compared to what? > If a company like Google with about ~180.000 employees Why should an organization even have 180000 employees? What determines the distribution of size of organizational units observed in an economy? And given an organization's size, what determines the height of its "pyramid"? The fact that management consultancies are making (in perpetuity) a plush living by helping reduce "middle management layers" tells you explicitly that the beast has a life of its own. Empire building and vicious internal politics that are disconnected from any sense of "efficiency" are pretty much part of "professional bureaucracies" - just as they are of the public sector ones. And whether we are clients, users or citizens we pay the price.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >These are just assertions. Efficient compared to what? Compared to numerous small companies of the aggregate same size. It's not just an assertion, Google (and other big companies) produces incredibly high rates of value per employee and goods at extremely low costs to consumers. >Why should an organization even have 180000 employees? What determines the distribution of size of organizational units observed in an economy? Coase told us the answer to this[1]. Organizations are going to be as large as they can possibly be until the internal cost of organization is larger than the external costs of transaction with other organizations. How large that is depends on the tools available to organize and the quality of organization, but tends larger over time because management techniques and information sharing tools become more sophisticated. The reason why large organizations are efficient is obvious if you turn it on its head. If we were all single individual organizations billing each other invoices we'd have maximum transaction costs and overhead. Bureaucracy and hierarchies minimize this overhead by turning it into a dedicated disciplines and rationalize that process. A city of 5 million people, centrally administered produces more economic value than a thousand villages with the same aggregate population. [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937...
  - openrisk 2y ago
    Economic arguments almost always apply strictly to idealized worlds where each individual calculates the pennies for each action etc. The degree to which such deductions apply to the real world varies. In this case large bureaucracies are everywhere in the public sector as well, where, at least to first order, price mechanisms, profit maximization etc. are not the driving force. Hierarchy of some form is innate to human organization, this is not the point. The alternative to a large organization with a sky-high hierarchy is not an inefficient solopreneur but a smaller organization with (possibly) a flater hierarchy. Even strictly within the Coase logic the "external cost" can be artificially low (non-priced externalities [1]), ranging from the mental health of employees, to the impact of oligopolistic markets on society's welfare etc. This creates an unusually generous buffer for "internal costs". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

agos 2y ago

effective, maybe. efficient... I would not be so sure.

yazaddaruvala 2y ago
Depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Small organizations define efficiency based on time to make number go up/down. Meanwhile, if something bad happens at 2am and no one wakes up - whatever there we’re likely no customers impacted. Larger organizations are really efficient at ensuring the p10 (ie worst) hires are not able to cause any real damage. Every other thing about the org is set up to most cost effectively ensure least damage. Meanwhile, numbers should also go up is a secondary priority.

dbspin 2y ago

Bureaucracies are certainly impersonal, but you'd be at a loss to find one that's genuinely rule based and meritocratic. To the extent that they become remain rule based they are no longer effective and get routed around. To the extent that they're meritocratic, the same thing happens with networks of influence. Once you get high enough, or decentralised enough bureaucracies work like any other human tribes. Bureaucracies may sometimes be effective ways to cut down on nepotism (although they manifestly fail at that in my country), but they're machines for manifesting cronyism.

openrisk 2y ago

> It's not ossified but efficient. These are just assertions. Efficient compared to what? > If a company like Google with about ~180.000 employees Why should an organization even have 180000 employees? What determines the distribution of size of organizational units observed in an economy? And given an organization's size, what determines the height of its "pyramid"? The fact that management consultancies are making (in perpetuity) a plush living by helping reduce "middle management layers" tells you explicitly that the beast has a life of its own. Empire building and vicious internal politics that are disconnected from any sense of "efficiency" are pretty much part of "professional bureaucracies" - just as they are of the public sector ones. And whether we are clients, users or citizens we pay the price.

Barrin92 2y ago
>These are just assertions. Efficient compared to what? Compared to numerous small companies of the aggregate same size. It's not just an assertion, Google (and other big companies) produces incredibly high rates of value per employee and goods at extremely low costs to consumers. >Why should an organization even have 180000 employees? What determines the distribution of size of organizational units observed in an economy? Coase told us the answer to this[1]. Organizations are going to be as large as they can possibly be until the internal cost of organization is larger than the external costs of transaction with other organizations. How large that is depends on the tools available to organize and the quality of organization, but tends larger over time because management techniques and information sharing tools become more sophisticated. The reason why large organizations are efficient is obvious if you turn it on its head. If we were all single individual organizations billing each other invoices we'd have maximum transaction costs and overhead. Bureaucracy and hierarchies minimize this overhead by turning it into a dedicated disciplines and rationalize that process. A city of 5 million people, centrally administered produces more economic value than a thousand villages with the same aggregate population. [1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937...
- openrisk 2y ago
  Economic arguments almost always apply strictly to idealized worlds where each individual calculates the pennies for each action etc. The degree to which such deductions apply to the real world varies. In this case large bureaucracies are everywhere in the public sector as well, where, at least to first order, price mechanisms, profit maximization etc. are not the driving force. Hierarchy of some form is innate to human organization, this is not the point. The alternative to a large organization with a sky-high hierarchy is not an inefficient solopreneur but a smaller organization with (possibly) a flater hierarchy. Even strictly within the Coase logic the "external cost" can be artificially low (non-priced externalities [1]), ranging from the mental health of employees, to the impact of oligopolistic markets on society's welfare etc. This creates an unusually generous buffer for "internal costs". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality