Organisational Awareness

Bureaucracy is a form of organisation. It is the modern way in which people organise their public affairs or private enterprises. Max Weber identified it, delineated its features, and developed an ideal type of bureaucracy. Much of what people commonly criticise as bureaucratism is, in fact, the result of poor organisational design, inadequate procedures, and a lack of institutional awareness, rather than an inherent failing of bureaucracy itself.

Bureaucracy is rational: it pursues rational goals and operates through rational mechanisms. It is also legal: positions and procedures are determined by law or, within private organisations, by internal rules and bylaws. The people who work within the system are separate from the positions they occupy. These features make bureaucracy a rule-based, impersonal and predictable form of organisation.

Bureaucratic organisation can be appropriated even for irrational, unjust or devilish ends and pursued through equally undesirable means. The point here, however, is not the desirability, legitimacy or morality of the ends or means employed, but the organisational viability and efficiency with which the chosen course of action can be executed. Bureaucratic rationality is a property of the organisational mechanism; it does not, by itself, confer legitimacy on the ends pursued or the means employed.

This brings us to two essential considerations: the pursuit of the common good as the purpose of public organisation, and efficiency as a means of ensuring fairness and impersonality. Personnel should have minimal discretion, as the prescribed procedures should ordinarily suffice to ensure the proper functioning of the system, without requiring anything beyond ordinary professional competence. Its USP is its mechanical functioning, with human sensibility on the part of personnel being an integral part of its design and training, so that the system combines human consideration with mechanical efficiency. As opposed to affective and customary ways of working, the rational-legal approach is certainly more efficient and, if designed with human well-being in mind, works far better for human beings than other approaches. Bureaucracy by itself is only as good or as bad as it is designed to be and the way it is observed, but even its basic template offers a far more efficient form of organisation than humanity had evolved until then.

Knowledge of a process, combined with the desire to improve it, makes a system better, while ignorance and carelessness make it dysfunctional. Awareness and civic sense, or their absence, make a country better or worse.

Niraj Kumar Jha