Bureaucracy: Trying to Comprehend a Phenomenon

The article exposes the author’s understanding of bureaucracy as a formal rationalization of human activity for the purpose of vertical-external management of it. In fact, it is an universal-international phenomenon, but in every country it has its own specifics. Traditionally, all the public cases in Russia were built on the powerfully vertical principle. The professional-communicative horizontal has always been underestimated or even forced out to the periphery. The chief figure (nachal’nik) is also very typical of the Russian bureaucratic “culture”. He is a man without a certain professional and business binding, a manager “of all trades”, instrumentally competent and politically loyal. To reach an admissible level of bureaucracy it is important to structure rationality by a search for optimality, to strengthen civil society and associated public control, to develop complexity thinking, to saturate relationships among people with social capital (primarily trust), etc.

bureaucracy, formal rationalization, power vertical, professional-communicative horizontal, management, optimization