Victoria Typpi
SOC-102
October 2, 2014
Dulce Medina
Bureaucracy
“Groups, people who think of themselves as belonging together and who interact with one another, are the essence of life in society,” (Henslin, 2013, p. 126). Groups are an important part of everyone’s well-being because they provide people with a sense of belonging. They also help shape who we are and there are two main types of groups. The first group, primary groups, include family and friends who provide intimate, face-to-face interaction, which give us an identity, a feeling of who we are (Henslin, 2013). After primary groups come secondary groups, which are much larger and more anonymous while being formal and impersonal (Henslin, 2013). An example of secondary groups are students and professors at a school. Since secondary are so impersonal, they usually break down into primary groups like how students form friendships within schools. Within society is a specialized group called a Bureaucracy, which is an organization which has become dominate in social life. There are five main characteristics of a bureaucracy and one organization that contains bureaucracy is the military. The first characteristic of a bureaucracy contains “clear levels, with assignments flowing downward and accountability flowing upward,” (Henslin, 2013, p. 133). Within each level the level above will assign responsibilities to the level below it and the level below are accountable for fulfilling those assignments assigned to them from the level above. As the flowchart goes down, the positions gain assignments that become harder while going up the flowchart, positions gain more accountability. In the military, the higher ups in the chain of command give orders to the people below them while the people below them complete those orders given to them. For the second characteristic, there are “a division of labor,”