ABSTRACT
Bureaucratic contexts have frequently been treated from a systems perspective. Although the behaviour characteristic of economic and political systems is grounded in the lifeworld via the generalised values that Talcott Parsons identified, the spheres have become ‘uncoupled’, with the systemic spheres breaking away and congealing into ‘blocks of norm-free sociality’. Parsons’s strategy is to introduce the idea of ‘generalized values’, which are values that can be presumed to motivate or bind all actors in the same way at all times and places. Formal rules are formulae that pre-establish the outcome of an interaction between particular types of actors in a given set of circumstances. The legitimacy of law in the areas has a direct connection to a communicatively structured consensus, which makes the idea that formal rules could link up to create autonomous social systems that are beyond human control look very implausible.
