The Ups and Downs of Bureaucratic Organization

Johan P. Olsen

No 14, ARENA Working Papers from ARENA

Abstract: Why do democracies give birth to bureaucracies and bureaucrats? How and why has a seemingly undesirable and unviable organizational form weathered relentless criticism over many years and is possibly experiencing a renaissance? Normative democratic theory, theories of formal organizations, and Weber’s ideas are used for exploring de-bureaucratization efforts since the late 1970s and the most recent decade’s rediscovery of bureaucracy. One lesson is that there has not been a monotonic development towards bureaucratization, as argued by Weber, or de-bureaucratization, as argued by his critics. Several normative and organizational components have co-existed. Yet the significance of each component and their relationships has varied over time. While elements of a theoretical framework are suggested, no great optimism for a comprehensive theory of bureaucratization and de-bureaucratization is offered. Institutions, agency, and macro forces all matter, but there is no agreement regarding under which conditions one factor matters more than the others. A later version of this paper has been published in Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 11, 2008, pp. 13-37

Keywords: democracy; administrative adaptation; institutionalisation; institutionalism; organization theory; organization theory; public administration; institutions; European Commission; political science (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-09-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sv.uio.no/arena/english/research/public ... pers2007/wp07_14.xml Full text (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erp:arenax:p0242

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ARENA Working Papers from ARENA
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sindre Eikrem Hervig ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).