The Profession of Government & Theories of Bureaucracy in the 20th Century

This article is a multidisciplinary overview of the evolution of the modern “bureaucratic phenomenon”, the classic organizational model for western industrialized societies. The author outlines three distinct eras in the development of organization theory and describes how they evolved. In the process, he explains how bureaucracy is necessary for the prevention of political corruption and for the safeguarding of proper democratic procedures. On the other hand, democracy generates a dilemma for a bureaucracy: under the present rather inconsistent democratic rules, bureaucracy is expected to be both independent and subservient, both politicized and non-politicized at one and the same time. While based on Chapter 2 of Public Sector Management in Canada (Phidd, 2001), this updated text applies equally as well to countries whose public sector is built around the classic bureaucratic model