This volume examines Max Weber’s pre-World War I thinking about bureaucracy. It suggests that Weber’s vision shares common components with the highly efficient Prussian General Staff military bureaucracy developed by Clausewitz and Helmuth von Moltke. Weber did not believe that Germany’s other major institutions, the Civil Service, industry, or the army could deliver world class performances since he believed that they pursued narrow, selfish interests. However, following Weber’s death in 1920, the model published by his wife Marianne contained none of the military material about which Weber had written approvingly in the early chapters of Economy and Society. Glynn Cochrane concludes that Weber’s model was unlikely to include military material after the Versailles peace negotiations (in which Weber participated) outlawed the Prussian General Staff in 1919.

Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject Ergonomics, grade: 1,0, Technical University of Chemnitz (Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Professur für Organisation und Arbeitswissenschaft), language: English, abstract: The text at hand deals with Max Weber ́s theory of bureaucracy and its negative consequences in Robert K. Merton ́s functional analysis. The starting point is the description of what Weber understands as rationalization and his conceptualization of the three types of legitimate domination. The purest and most rational type of legal domination is in Weber ́s eyes bureaucracy with its benefits of precision, calculability, controllability and efficiency - in short, with its technical superiority. Weber ́s position concerning bureaucratization is ambivalent, because he also sees the negative consequences in dehumanization and excessive control, which ends in an "iron cage‟. Merton analysis outlines the dysfunctions resulting from bureaucratic structures. The negative consequences he identifies are the displacement of goals, the trained incapacity, over-conformity and esprit de corps of the officials and the depersonalization of relationships.

This book argues that if we are to think differently about management, we must first rewrite management history.

For this important selection from Weber, sections of text from Weber's major works (Gesammelte, Aufsatze Zur Religionssoziologie, including The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; General Economic History; and The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilisations) have been carefully edited and substantially translated to form a coherent and integrated volume. Professor Andreski's aim has been to use Weber's own works to explain crucial turns in the evolution of societies and cultures, while eliminating the difficulties of language and frequent mistranslation which have previously made Weber so difficult and baffling for students new to his work. An essay by Andreski introduces the selections, which are centred on Weber's principal interest, the relationship between capitalism, religion and bureaucracy. He seeks to correct those misinterpretations of Weber's work which have stressed his classification, rather than his attempts to theorise and explain social phenomena on the basis of a comparitive analysis of universal historical trends. This book was first published in 1983.

What is a bureaucracy, from where does it come, and how does it develop? Japanese have long described their nation as a “kingdom of bureaucrats", but until now, no historian has fully explained the historical origins of the mammoth Japanese executive state. In this ground-breaking study, translated into English for the first time, Yuichiro Shimizu traces the rise of the modern Japanese bureaucracy from the Meiji Restoration through the early 20th century. He reveals how the making of the bureaucracy was none other than the making of Japanese modernity itself. Through careful political analysis and vivid human narratives, he tells the dynamic story of how personal ambition, new educational institutions, and state bureaucratic structures interacted to make a modern political system premised on recruiting talent, not status or lineage. Bringing cutting-edge Japanese scholarship to a global audience, The Origins of the Modern Japanese Bureaucracy is not only a reconceptualization of modern Japanese political history but an account of how the ideal of “pursuing one's own calling” became the foundational principle of the modern nation-state.

This book offers new readings of the epistemology, methods and politics of Max Weber, a foundation thinker of modern social science and international relations theory.