Modernity Bureaucracy has been a fundamental institution of government for several thousand years. All traditional empires and many premodern kingdoms developed more or less elaborate bureaucracies -- those of the Chinese, Roman, and Ottoman Empires are among the most familiar. As hierarchies of appointed officials, bureaucracies were never democratic in structure or purpose -- they were designed to enable monarchs to administer domains under their authority, to expand those domains, and to protect them from aggressive neighboring peoples. To these ancient functions, modern democracies have added many new tasks driven by the requisites of representative governance, industrialization, and nationalism. Modernity, therefore, has vastly expanded the functions of traditional bureaucracies, transforming them into formidable dragons. The dragon of modern bureaucracy resembles traditional bureaucracy as a form of hierarchic organization designed to dominate and control subject populations and to do so efficiently. Its new forms evolved in the context of modern imperialism: In order to rule their empires, even the most democratic of the modern states developed mechanisms of colonial administration that permitted far-away metropoles to maintain long-term domination over conquered peoples. In short, no bureaucracies, modern or traditional, are democratic; they are instead administrative and hierarchic. However, democratizing countries were able to import bureaucratic structures and bring them under popular control. Under such control, representative governments could use bureaucracies to provide public services that have become increasingly necessary for the populations of all modern states. However, modern bureaucracies can also function as organs of domination and exploitation, as we can easily see in many countries where arbitrary and oppressive -- even totalitarian -- regimes rely on bureaucracies to sustain and maintain their ruthless domination. The key variable has not been any fundamental transformation in the structure of bureaucratic organization -- rather, it has involved the establishment of new political structures able to maintain popular control over the conduct and performance of appointed public officials. My purpose, here is to describe how three aspects of modernity -- industrialism, democracy, and nationalism -- have impinged on bureaucracy in the world today, especially in the liberated new states that have emerged on the ashes of collapsed empires. Industrialization The historical and interlocking dynamics of industrialization, democratization, and nationalism are explored in Riggs (1994) and I shall not repeat that discussion here. Instead, I shall focus on the implications of each of these aspects of modernity for bureaucracy and public administration. Let me start with the industrial revolution, whose direct implications for modern bureaucracy are obvious and stunning. First of all, the need for complex and highly technical public services has been vastly increased by industrialization, as has the capacity of appointed officials to organize and arm themselves for collective action -- let me emphasize the point that military officers as well as civil servants are appointed officials, bureaucrats. The growing need for their services conjoined with the new resources (including weapons) that industrialization offers has greatly increased the potential political power of bureaucrats, giving them the capacity to destroy as well as to sustain the life of fragile socioeconomic systems. One can argue that capital and capitalism (especially in city states) is quite ancient, but industrialization, involving large-scale production using inanimate sources of energy coal, oil, electricity), is a modern phenomenon that requires much more than capitalism. Capitalists could only risk investing in the costly processes of large-scale production after they had secured enough political influence to protect their investments and to safeguard the required means of production, sources of raw materials, and access to widespread markets. …
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Jan 30, 2023
Dr B S Mudholkar + 1
