Sum Blog 4

Weber’s “Bureaucratic Machine” illustrates the consequences of bureaucracy, one of them being that it limits our human potential. This type of system requires high specialization of an individual’s duty in order to complete a task most efficiently. I hear this and think of horse blinds, you become assigned to one task only and you complete it to their standard, that’s it. They are reducing a person’s full potential. I think it comes back to the efficiency of the company or organization, if somebody leaves that job for whatever reason; they want to be able to fill it as fast as they can and don’t want to have anything uncovered.

Another thing with this is that everything becomes predictable. In a way it’s nice because there are fewer problematic surprises and the few that do come up generally have a simple solution. Though on the other hand it’s very slow to adapting change, and with the size of the business directly correlating to the time it takes to implement the change, it’s no surprise that it can become a large problem to move things around after a certain point, that certain point is a 12 ton snow ball with a boulder in the middle, zooming down a hill that only a massive catastrophic event can stop.

           There’s one other little thing that I couldn’t quite understand, how Weber said that bureaucratic organizations come into power on the basis of leveling economic and social differences. Isn’t it a system based on levels? It seems that both democratic and bureaucratic systems have founding rules that contradict a majority of what they are today.