Lecture 5: Weber and Bureaucracy

Weber: 3 Types of Authority

• Charismatic Authority

❑ Those in authority possess charisma

❑ No fixed hierarchy of officials

❑ No legal rules governing organization

❑ Short-lived: dependent upon personality of leader.

Examples: Jesus’s disciples Religious cults

❑ After leader’s death the movement must become ‘routinized’ or collapse traditional or bureaucratic control/authority.

• Traditional Authority

Two forms

a) Household – relatives, favourites and servants (e.g. ‘Biraderi’ in Pakistan. ‘Family’ in Sicily).

b) Vassals – feudal lords who swear loyalty to monarch and hold land in exchange for military service.

In both cases social actions are based upon custom/ingrained habit.

Bureaucractic Authority

• Weber constructed an ‘ideal type’ of bureaucratic organization. He argued that bureaucracies were increasingly moving towards this ‘pure’ type.

• The ideal type of bureaucracy contains these elements

❑ Specialization: Each administrative official has a clearly defined area of responsibility and competence:

‘The regular activities required for the purposes of the organization are distributed in a fixed way of official duties’.

❑ Sub-division: Complex tasks are broken down into manageable parts: state administration divided into various departments – social security, defence, finance etc.

❑ Hierarchy: A chain of command and responsibility is established whereby officials are accountable to their immediate superior for their conduct and for those below them.

‘The organization of offices follows the principle of hierarchy’

❑ Rules and Regulations: The functioning of a