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Most contemporary scholars regard bureaucracy as an inefficient phenomenon. At the same time, we may find a great number of bureaucratic organizations in the various social spheres. Max Weber, who introduced the concept of bureaucracy into the social sciences, however, was convinced that bureaucracy is superior to any other organizational form and explained its prevalence by the immanent rationality of bureaucratic organizations. In analyzing Weber's text, the author argues that Weber was mistranslated into English and then misinterpreted. Weber's term rationality is not at all identical to efficiency. Rationality includes also uncertainty reduction regarding internal organizational procedures as well as outputs. Uncertainty reduction may induce several advantages, which, in several cases, ensure organizational superiority.
Social sciences differ greatly from natural sciences. The lack of a widely accepted methodology and the lack of opportunity to test various hypotheses by experiments in social sciences are perhaps the most frequently cited differences. For that reason, several models referring to the same phenomenon frequently coexist without a chance to rigorously test these models against one another and reality.
This feature of social sciences can be traced especially well in the case of bureaucracy. The term is interpreted very diversely among branches of social sciences and even among authors within one branch, such as sociology of organizations, political science, and so forth. Most of these diverging interpretations can be traced back to one author, to Max Weber, and to his concept of bureaucracy. Weber saw bureaucracy as the most rational organizational form and thus as superior to any other form of organizations. Subsequent authors, however, found that bureaucracy is far from being perfectly efficient. On the contrary, several scholars concluded that bureaucracy is overly inefficient.
In the first part of this article, I will briefly sum up the various approaches to the bureaucratic phenomenon. I attempt to depict how the different approaches converge to a very similar conclusion, to the-partial or complete-inefficiency of bureaucratic organizations. Then, I contrast the inefficiency theorem with a simple fact, namely, that bureaucratic organizations are predominant in several social spheres. If efficiency is crucial for the prevalence of any organizational form and if bureaucracy is inefficient, how could it prevail? The predictive power of Weber's theory at this point seems better than that of...