What is Max Weber’s theory of Bureaucracy?

Max Weber is considered to be the first person who attempted at the systematic understanding of the bureaucracy. Max Weber identifies three types of organisation on the basis of exercise of authority. (i) Charismatic Authority, (ii) Traditional Authority and (iii) Legal or Rational Authority.

According to him, in Legal or Rational Authority, people or followers accept the authority of a leader, which is based on the belief in the rightness of law. It is legal because authority is exercised by means of a system of rules and procedures by reason of the office, which an individual holds. The administrative apparatus corresponding to this kind of authority is bureaucracy. 

Max Weber’s conceptualisation of bureaucracy provides an influential conceptual framework in public administration. For Weber, bureaucracy was a control system based on rational rules, which regulated the organisation’s structure and process according to technical knowledge and maximum efficiency. Max Weber examines the process of evolution of modern civilisations, with bureaucracies constituting an integral part of this evolutionary process. Weber’s bureaucratic model, which operated in the framework of an ideal typical legal-rational authority system was based on the accentuation of certain logically interrelated characteristics of an advanced administrative system. Even though Max Weber’s bureaucratic theory developed independently of the early American administrative thought, it shared many of the premises of management thought of structuralists such as Taylor and Fayol. Weber emphasised the importance of rationality in administration in order to facilitate the achievement of the implicit goal of efficiency in the solution of complex and specialised problems.