CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Bureaucracy is a distinctive arrangement used by
human beings to organize their activities. The invention of Western bureaucracy
several centuries ago helped solve the problem for leaders of governing human
systems that grew larger and more complicated with each passing year. The great
virtue and probably defining characteristic of bureaucracy, according to the
one of the founders of sociology, German Max Weber ( 1864-1920), is as “an
institutional method for applying general rules to specific cases, thereby
making the actions of government fair and predictable”.
Weber contributed much to the understanding of
bureaucracy as a social phenomenon. His ideal bureaucracy legitimately,
efficiently, and rationally organized people and work to get things done by the
elected leader in a democracy. Bureaucracy, he noted, provides for the role of
the “functionary” (an interesting word), who is the person interspersed between
leader and electorate within a democratic system. Ten features of the Weberian
bureaucracy archetype follow:
1. The bureaucrats must be personally free and
subject to authority only with respect to the impersonal duties of their
offices.
2. The bureaucrats are arranged in a clearly defined
hierarchy of offices.
3. The functions of each office are clearly
specified.
4. The bureaucrats accept and maintain their
appointments freely—without duress.
5. Appointments to office are made on the basis of
technical qualifications, which ideally are substantiated by examinations
administered by the appointing authority, a university, or both.
6. The bureaucrats receive money salaries and
pension rights, which reflect the varying levels of the hierarchy. While the
bureaucrats are free to leave the organization, they can be removed from their
offices only under previously stated, specific circumstances.
7. The office must be the bureaucrat’s sole or at
least major occupation.
8. A career system is essential; while promotion may
be the result of either seniority or merit, it must be premised on the judgment
of hierarchical superiors.
9. The bureaucrats do not have property rights to
their office or any personal claim to the resources that go with it.
10.
The
bureaucrat’s conduct must be subject to systematic control and strict
discipline.
Bureaucracy
has been called a concept with a career. Today it has at least four separate
meanings:
1. The totality of government offices or bureaus
that constitute the permanent government of a state; that is, those people and
functions that continue irrespective of changes in political leadership.
2. All of the public officials of a government.
3. A general invective to refer to any inefficient
organization encumbered by red tape.
4. A specific set of structural arrangements.
Bureaucracy is sometimes called the “fourth
branch of government…While technically under control of the executive branch,
it sometimes seems to function as if it had a will, power, and legal authority
all its own.” (5)
The Two Main Problems of Bureaucracy
Most
people at some time or another complain about two main problems with
bureaucracy: inefficiency and arbitrariness,
according to political scientist and author James Q. Wilson. Wilson received
his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1959 and later taught at Harvard
and UCLA. (He is well known for his influential “broken windows” theory of
crime (1982), that is, if police and the community ignore public disorder
(symbolized by broken windows), then law-abiding people will be intimidated and
criminals will get the message that “anything goes.” Many police
departments adopted this theory as part of “community policing.” Without good
statistics on crime rates, nobody would know what worked in fighting crime.)
Weber
was a German sociologist and formulated ideas on the ideal management approach
for large organizations. Unlike Taylor and Fayol who tried to solve practical
problems related to the activity of managing, Weber was more concerned with the
basic issue of structuring the enterprise. He developed a set of ideas about
the structure of an organization that define what we know as “bureaucracy.”
The characteristics of an ideal formalized
organization or bureaucracy as described by Weber consist of the following set
of typical characteristics:
- Division
of labor : authority and responsibility are defined very clearly and set
out as official duties; - Hierarchy
of authority: office positions are organized in a hierarchy of authority
resulting in a chain of command or what is known as “the scalar
principle”; - Formal
selection: employees are selected on the basis of technical qualifications
(merits) through formal examinations, education or training; - Career
managers: managers are not owners of the units they administer, but
professionals who work for fixed salaries and pursue “careers” within
their respective fields; - Formal
rules: administrators must function according to strict formal rules and
other controls regarding the conduct of their official duties. These rules
and controls would be impersonal and uniformly applied. .
Because of the emphasis on efficiency
that had developed around the turn of the 20th century, many management
scholars and practitioners interpreted Weber’s writings on bureaucracy as a
prescription for organizing. However, Weber was more interested in developing
his bureaucratic type as a method for comparing organizational forms across
societies. He believed firmly that not one single organization would conform to
the dimensions of his bureaucratic model. He only believed that some
organizations would have a close resemblance to his ideal type of bureaucracy.
Weber was merely testing his thesis of the modernization of society
characterized by rationalization. The more modern societies become, the more
rational the citizens will become and the greater the need to create
bureaucratic organizations. It was Weber’s interest in the rationality of
social life that directed his attention to the study of organizations.
On the topic of bureaucracy and efficiency,
Wilson wrote: “Efficiency is a ratio of valued resources used to valued outputs
produced…The smaller that ratio, the more efficient the production. If the
valued output is a rebuilt skating rink, [for example,] then whatever process
uses the fewest dollars or the least time to produce a satisfactory rink is the
most efficient process.”
But,
Wilson notes, the valued output may not be only a rebuilt skating rink!
Government has many valued outputs, including “a reputation for integrity, the
confidence of the people, and the support of important interest groups. When we
complain about skating rinks not being built on time we speak as if all we
cared about were skating rinks. But when we complain that contracts were
awarded without competitive bidding or in a way that allowed bureaucrats to
line their pockets we acknowledge that we care about many things besides
skating rinks; we care about the onstraint that we want government to observe.
But
is honest and accountable in its actions and properly responsive to worthy
constituencies may be a very efficient government, if we measure efficience by
taking into account all of the valued outputs.” Wilson concludes: “A perfectly
efficient agency could be a monstrous one, swiftly denying us our liberties,
economically inflicting injustices, and competently expropriating our wealth.”
Arbitrariness refers to “officials acting without
legal authority, or with that authority in a way that offends our sense of
justice. Justice means, first, that we require the government to treat people
equally on the basis of clear rules known in advance: If Becky and Bob both are
driving sixty miles per hour in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone and the police give
a ticket to Bob, we believe they also should give a ticket to Becky. Second we
believe that justice obliges the government to take into account the special
needs and circumstances of individuals: If Becky is speeding because she is on
her way to the hospital to give birth to a child and Bob is speeding for the
fun of it, we may feel that the police should ticket Bob but not Becky. Justice
in the first sense means fairness, in the second it means responsiveness. Obviously,
fairness and responsiveness often are in conflict.”
Wilson says “the checks and balances of the
American constitutional system reflect our desire to reduce the arbitrariness
of official rule. That desire is based squarely on the premise that inefficiency
is a small price to pay for freedom and responsiveness. Congressional
oversight, judicial review, interest-group participation, media investigations,
and formalized procedures all are intended to check administrative discretion.”
Constraints such as these reduce the efficiency of an agency but also its
arbitrariness. “We want the government to be both fair and responsive, but the
more rules impose to insure fairness (that is, to treat all people alike [like
Becky and Bob above]), the harder we make it for the government to be
responsive (that is, to take into account the special needs and circumstances
of a particular case.)”.
Americans fear bureaucracy’s use of discretion to
guide decisions and actions, and insist on rules, for example, particularly “at
the hands of street-level bureaucracies that deal with us as individuals rather
than as organized groups and that touch the more intimate aspects of our lives
[e.g., police, schools, medical institutions, prisons]. That worry is natural;
in these settings we feel helpless and The State seems omnipotent. We want
these bureaucracies to treat us fairly but we also want them to be responsive
to our particular needs…”
Did you know that European bureaucracies are less
rule-bound than American bureaucracies? This is true, according to Wilson. “The
United States relies on rules to control the exercise of official judgment to a
greater extent than any other industrialized democracy. The reason…has little
to do with the kinds of bureaucrats we have and everything to do with the
political environment in which those bureaucrats must work.”
How then does a society strike a reasonable
balance between governance by rules and governance by discretion? First, Wilson
suggests, we must “sensitize ourselves to the gains and losses associated with
governance by rule rather than by discretion.” We need to be aware that in America
rules induce agencies to
1 produce certain observable outcomes,
2 create offices, procedures, and claims inside an
organization that can protect precarious values, and
3 specify minimum standards that must be met.
Talented, strongly motivated people usually will
find ways of making even rule-ridden systems work to get the job done, says
Wilson. Second, if we wish to complain about how rule-ridden our government
agencies seem to be, we should direct those complaints not to the agencies but
to the Congress, the courts, and the organized interests that make effective
use of Congress and the courts.”
1.2STATEMENT OF PROBLEMS
The
Power holding was known in the eighties
and nineties for early dispatch of services, result oriented performance and
high productivity. It is pathetic to note that these qualities that endeared
students and the Nigeria, Anambra state
are now extinct today with the following research questions:
1.
Does
bureaucratic structure and control encourage and organization to achieve its
objective.
2.
Does
bureaucratic improve decision making.
3.
Does
bureaucratic improve productivity.
4.
Does
bureaucratic improve efficiency in an organization or bureaucratic structure
like Power holding
1.3OBJECTIVE OF STUDY
The study is aimed at:
i.
To know how
bureaucracy structure and control encourage an organization to achieve its
objectives.
ii.
To find out
how bureaucracy improve decision making.
iii.
To ascertain
how bureaucracy improve productivity
iv.
To determine
how bureaucracy improve efficiency I an organization
1.4SCOPE AND LIMITATION OF STUDY
Since in large organization bureaucracy is eminent and inevitable for the success of
such organization, the study shall focus on the Power holding and due to its structural largeness the study
shall be narrowed down to the administrative sections:
In the
study the researcher encouraged certain constraints that impede the academic
work. These are:
i.
time
constraints
ii.
unwillingness
of staff to give out information
iii.
funding
other academic workload .
i.TIME
CONTRANT: This posed as a ,imitation to the study, as the time framework
constructed by the department for the kick off of the study was incompatible
with our academic work and session bread
ii.
UNSILLINGNESS:
the researcher could not gather as much information and facts due to non
compliance and non challant attitude of respondents that workers against the
study
iii.
FUNDING; this
is another are of constraint the researcher faced. finance was not available
for mobilization of the work
iv.
OTHER ACADMIC
WORKLOAD: the researchers department semester course load was numerous and
cumbersome and thus acted as a limitation factor of the study.
1.5SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
1.
the findings
in t his study shall be of immense help to administrators and managers in
correcting animates coherent in a bureaucracy set up.
2.
It will aid
the government and organizations to avoid bureaucracy bottle neck red tapism
and I do not care attitude portrayed by work.
3.
it will also
help organization in boosting productivity
4.
Corporate
bodies and entrepreneurs that mish to shard their own business organization
would find this study invaluable in t heir endeavors.
5.
academically,
it will help other researchers in further research