ABSTRACT
The tasks of government have tended to be performed by a special type of organisation, especially if these tasks are paid for by means of taxes. When public activities are financed over the budget, then they tend to be given an organisational structure which follows the basic principles of Weber’s ideal type of a bureaucracy. We will call this organisation the ‘bureau’. The bureau is to the public sector what the enterprise is to the private sector, i.e. a governance mechanism that has proved highly suitable to the tasks given to it, at least most of the time.
