ABSTRACT
When, during the nineteenth century, industrializing societies experienced the increased productivity of bureaucratization, scholarship concentrated on the functionality of bureaucracy. Weber’s ideal type analysis could be (and was often) interpreted as a justifi cation and exhortation of bureaucratization, although he, like Durkheim and others, also noted its alienating eff ects on individuals and its other dysfunctional elements. As bureaucratization increased, its dysfunctionalities became more apparent and attracted more and more attention during the fi rst half of the twentieth century, and bureaucracy itself became subject to increasing criticism. But only in the second half of the century has research concentrated on the dysfunctional bureaucracy, suggesting that further bureaucratization may induce so many bureaupathologies that bureaucracy will become dysfunctional, productivity will decline, performance will be inhibited, and many of the already overbureaucratized organizations would be better off if they debureaucratized. So infl uential have these critics been that policymakers now look for alternative ways of delivering public services other than through public bureaucracies and responsive management experiments with debureaucratization to increase productivity.
