ABSTRACT
Max Weber from Germany is one of the most famous names among sociology's founding scholars, and his contributions to the discipline have been enormous. One has to recall his work on the sociology of religion, culminating in his theory on the impact of the protestant ethic on the development of Western capitalism. For organization studies, and for military studies in particular, Weber's work on bureaucracy theory has been tremendously influential, and despite signals to the contrary, its impact can hardly be overestimated. Bureaucracy as an organized form of human action has developed over centuries, as far back as the Egyptian and Roman empires and before. The bureaucratic organizational system has been refined over centuries. It aims to ensure predictability, rationality, calculability and protection against arbitrariness of those in power, particularly for the inmates of the organization but also for those affected by state conduct or, in the case of the military, state violence.
