Life With Bureaucracies
Primary groups, which are parents, relatives, and friends, play an important role in our lives. Today, however, we spend most of our time in secondary groups such as schools, factories, government offices, or banks. We refer to these types of organizations as formal organizations, which are large, special purpose groups that are explicitly designed to achieve specific goals. Like other groups, formal organizations are characterized by unique, and complex sets of interrelated statuses, roles, and norms. Formal organizations also involve clearly established rules, regulations, and standards of conduct that are designed to coordinate people’s behavior to achieve specific organizational ...
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Egypt, ancient China, and in the Roman and Byzantine empires. It was not until recently, however, with the emergence of large societies based on complex technologies, that bureaucracies come to permeate people’s daily lives. The reason seems simple. Spontaneous, casual, and personal relationships, such as those found in primary groups, are inefficient when it comes to coordinating the activities of large groups of people working towards specific goals. Imagine trying to build a library with no hierarchical authority among the workers or with no rules of procedure. If no workers felt like mixing cement, the walls could not be built. If the electricians decided to spend the day at the beach, the drywallers could not construct the walls. To cope with these problems, the trend in modern societies has been toward rationalization (the replacement of shifting and ambiguous rules of procedure with specific rules that are based on the best way to achieve practical goals). This ...
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students to write papers such as this particular one that I am doing, and take the examinations that I have to take in order to pass this class. In turn, the faculty are accountable to the chairpersons of their departments and the deans of their college, or school.
Third, people’s conduct and job responsibilities in a bureaucracy are governed by formal rules and procedures or norms that typically appear in written form. At SIUC, for example, the university bulletin is a set of rules that specifies what each student must do in order to receive a degree. One university bulletin, for example, specifies that a sociology major must complete 124 credit hours, including 38 hours of research ...
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Life With Bureaucracies. (2005, March 19). Retrieved November 23, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Life-With-Bureaucracies/23928
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"Life With Bureaucracies." Essayworld.com. March 19, 2005. Accessed November 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Life-With-Bureaucracies/23928.
"Life With Bureaucracies." Essayworld.com. March 19, 2005. Accessed November 23, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Life-With-Bureaucracies/23928.
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