Max Weber (1864-1920) First to develop the concept of the bureaucratic organization

Max Weber was the foremost social scientist of his day. Along with Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim, Weber is regarded as one of the founders of modern sociology. He had little interest in management, yet he had such a dominant influence on how organizations have been managed.

Possibly as a result of his authoritarian upbringing, Weber was interested in why people obeyed commands. This interest led him to distinguish between power as the ability to force obedience irrespective of resistance, and authority as the ability to get orders obeyed as a matter of course (hopefully voluntarily).

Weber described power as the probability of carrying out one’s own will despite resistance or, at its extreme, as the ability to force people to obey. He linked organizational power to structure and authority. According to Weber, there were three types of legitimate authority.
1.    Charismatic
2.    Traditional
3.    Rational-legal

Under charismatic authority, the leader is obeyed because of follower’s faith in his or her special qualities. Charismatic authority was not considered by Weber as a sustainable option as the basis for authority, principally because its inspirational and motivational qualities disappear when the leader relinquishes the post. Under traditional authority, leaders have authority by virtue of the status they have inherited—by birth, custom, precedent, etc. Traditional authority, too, was fraught with problems and was considered unsustainable. A more rational analysis led Weber to distinguish a rational-legal authority system.

In Weber’s view, authority within a bureaucracy is both legal and rational when it is exercised through a system of rules and procedures attached to a job or role being undertaken. Weber’s bureaucracy-based, rational-legal authority worked as follows:

• The organization is structured around official functions that are bound by rules, each area having its own specified competence.
• Functions are structured into offices organized into a hierarchy that follows technical rules and norms for which training is provided.
• The administration is separated from the ownership of the means of production.
• The rules, decisions, and actions of the administration are recorded in writing.

Weber claimed that the bureaucracy was technically the most efficient form of organization because, within it, work is conducted with precision, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, and reduction of friction.

Weber acknowledged that bureaucracies organized along rational lines had their strong-points (minimizing abuse of power, for example) as well as its shortcomings (slow to react). He recognized that the pursuit of efficiency could contribute to emotional detachment and an absence of professionalism—turning people into cogs in a machine. (Marx’s theories of alienation are not dissimilar to Weber’s own reflections of the negatives associated with bureaucracy.)

William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) expanded on much of the mundaneness associated with the bureaucracy. More recently, Scott Adams in The Dilbert Principle takes a light-hearted view of life in a bureaucracy.Bureaucracy became the model for the 20th-century organization and was encapsulated in Alfred Sloan’s General Motors. 

While the concept of bureaucracy is met with continuing criticism, there remains an acknowledged need for order, procedures, levels of authority, and controls that are an inherent part of a bureaucracy. The challenge remains to develop systems that combine necessary bureaucratic features with a people-oriented, flexible, and imaginative style.

Weber’s memorable writings include The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) and Theory of Social and Economic Organization (1947).


Max Weber’s contributions to the organizational structure, power, and giving orders is substantial. You will find the e-book:Leadership and the e-topic: How to give orders useful starting points for any further exploration of the application of Weber’s ideas.

While a wide variety of sources has been used in compiling the Guru of the Month series, special mention is made of Business: The Ultimate Resource (London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2002, 2172 pages). This publication is the most concise, informative, and useful of references, and considered particularly beneficial to anyone interested in further exploration of the contributions of influential pioneers of business and management.