Iron Cage - Costs of Bureaucracies

Costs of Bureaucracies

“Rational calculation . . . reduces every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how to transform himself… to a bigger cog… The passion for bureaucratization at this meeting drives us to despair.”

• Loss of individuality; labor is now being sold to someone who is in control, instead of individuals being artisans and craftsmen and benefiting from their own labor.
• Loss of autonomy; others are dictating what an individual’s services are worth.
• Individuals develop an obsession with moving on to bigger and better positions, but someone else will always be determining the value of our achievements.
• Lack of individual freedom; individuals can no longer engage in a society unless they belong to a large scale organization where they are given specific tasks in return for giving up their personal desires to conform to the bureaucracy’s goals and are now following legal authority.
• Specialization; with specialization, society becomes more interdependent and has a less common purpose. There is a loss in the sense of community because the purpose of bureaucracies is to get the job done efficiently.

Bureaucratic hierarchies can control resources in pursuit of their own personal interests, which impacts society’s lives greatly and society has no control over this. It also affects society’s political order and governments because bureaucracies were built to regulate these organizations, but corruption remains an issue. The goal of the bureaucracy has a single-minded pursuit that can ruin social order; what might be good for the organization might not be good for the society as a whole, which can later harm the bureaucracy’s future. Formal rationalization in bureaucracy has its problems as well. There are issues of control, depersonalization and increasing domination. Once the bureaucracy is created, the control is indestructible. There is only one set of rules and procedures, which reduces everyone to the same level. Depersonalization occurs because individual situations are not accounted for. Most importantly, the bureaucracies will become more dominating over time unless they are stopped. In an advanced industrial-bureaucratic society, everything becomes part of the expanding machine, even people.

While bureaucracies are supposed to be based on rationalization, they act in the exact opposite manner. Political bureaucracies are established so that they protect our civil liberties, but they violate them with their imposing rules. Development and agricultural bureaucracies are set so that they help farmers, but put them out of business due to market competition that the bureaucracies contribute to. Service bureaucracies like health care are set to help the sick and elderly, but then they deny care based on specific criteria.