ABSTRACT
Bureaucracy is a social invention, perfected during the industrial revolution to organize and direct the activities of the business firm. Corsica, according to Gibbon, is much easier to deplore than to describe. The same holds true for bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is like a modern judge who is a vending machine into which the pleadings are inserted together with the fee and which then disgorges the judgment together with its reasons mechanically derived from the code. The bureaucratic 'machine model', which Max Weber outlined, was developed as a reaction against the personal subjugation, nepotism, cruelty, emotional vicissitudes, and capricious judgment which passed for managerial practices in the early days of the industrial revolution. Almost everybody, including many observers of organizational behavior, approach bureaucracy with a chip on his shoulder. Weber, the developer of the theory of bureaucracy, came around to condemn the apparatus he helped immortalize.
