Bureaucracy: Trying to Comprehend a Phenomenon

The article exposes the author’s understanding of bureaucracy as a formal rationalization of human activity for the purpose of vertical-external management of it. In fact, it is an universal-international phenomenon, but in every country it has its own specifics. Traditionally, all the public cases in Russia were built on the powerfully vertical principle. The professional-communicative horizontal has always been underestimated or even forced out to the periphery. The chief figure (nachal’nik) is also very typical of the Russian bureaucratic “culture”. He is a man without a certain professional and business binding, a manager “of all trades”, instrumentally competent and politically loyal. To reach an admissible level of bureaucracy it is important to structure rationality by a search for optimality, to strengthen civil society and associated public control, to develop complexity thinking, to saturate relationships among people with social capital (primarily trust), etc