ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the international literature on the development of bureaucracies, pointing to the considerable influence of Weberian concepts of bureaucracy and the critique of Weber based especially on the development of post-Weberian and Marxian sociology. In the wake of 1994 many South Africans saw the democratic reform process as the precursor to fundamental changes in the state and its organs of government and administration. The Government of National Unity was established with the express intention of attempting to limit and even to reconcile the vast contradictions in South African society. The most systematic elaboration of the theory of bureaucracy is to be found in the writings of Max Weber, the German sociologist and commentator. Bureaucratic apparatuses do not, therefore, operate in a social vacuum. What is rational and efficient for one social class or layer might be quite contrary to the interests and feelings of another.
