The Ideal-Type: Some Conceptions and Misconceptions

Abstract

MAx WEBER utilized the ideal-type in various ways. One of them was in his analysis of bureaucracy as a form of social organization. Generally, he stated that the bureaucratic type of administration is a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of carrying out imperative control over human beings.' More specifically, he stated the following characteristics of the ideal-type of bureaucracy: 2 (1) It consists of a formation of offices with each office having a specified span of control, and specified duties and responsibilities. (2) offices are organized into a hierarchy with each lower office under the control and supervision of the next higher one. (3) Operations are governed by a system of rules and consist of the application of these rules to particular cases. (4) Each office is occupied by an official who conducts himself in a spirit of formalistic impersonality. (5) occupancy of an office is based on technical competency, and the hierarchy is a career line for the office occupant. There are other characteristics which could be said to be a part of this configuration; but the above are at least the core characteristics of the ideal-type of bureaucracy as Weber developed it. In a recent study of complex organizations, I found a number of criticisms and modifications of Weber's concept of bureaucracy. As I studied these, however, they largely seemed to be based on misunderstandings of what an ideal-type is and how it is to be utilized. Actually, these criticisms did not contribute to the improvement of the theory of complex organizations but rather served as demonstrations of what may be a widespread confusion con1 Max Weber, The Essentials of Bureaucratic Organization: An Ideal-Type Construction, in Reader in ed. Robert K. Merton et al. (Glencoe, Ill., 1952), p. 24. This is a reprint from Henderson's and Parsons' translation of Weber's discussion of the types of authority in Chapter 3 of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. 2 See op. cit., pp. 18-27, and Bureaucracy, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, translated and edited with an introduction by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1946), pp. 196-244.