Formal organizations have been around for several thousand years with the development of domestication and, eventually, agriculture. But bureaucracy as a major characteristic of such organizations, as the German sociologist (and "big daddy!") Max Weber showed, didn't develop until populations started exploding with the Industrial Revolution a few centuries ago. The reason is that agrarian societies, in which most people lived traditional lives in small villages and spread apart in rural areas within a nation-state or empire, lacked the technologies to compile information and communicate messages efficiently. And tradition trumped efficiency as a way people guided their lives, in any event. The development of bureaucracy, in other words, was a functional feature of modern societies that allowed for the efficient management of large and growing populations. But bureaucracies have several dysfunctional aspects to them too, which your book describes. One of them is an anti-democratic tendency that takes hold as power and decision-making get concentrated into fewer and fewer hands at the top of what you might visualize as a pyramidal structure. This tendency was identified in the German sociologist Robert Michels' (1915) research as the so-called 'iron law of oligarchy,' and its consequences, whether in governments or corporations, can be the opposite of functional and "well-managed." Indeed, they can be disastrous! Considering the early 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, or any other recent contemporary news event you've followed, describe an example of how the head of some very large organization has made a decision that has been harmful—or otherwise negative—for large numbers of people who are part of that organization, or who are directly affected by it. In thinking about what example you want to discuss, include one in which the input of the many people 'down the pyramid,' who lack as much power, might have led to a better outcome.
Formal organizations have been around for several thousand years with the development of domestication and, eventually, agriculture. But bureaucracy as a major characteristic of such organizations, as the German sociologist (and "big daddy!") Max Weber showed, didn't develop until populations started exploding with the Industrial Revolution a few centuries ago. The reason is that agrarian societies, in which most people lived traditional lives in small villages and spread apart in rural areas within a nation-state or empire, lacked the technologies to compile information and communicate messages efficiently. And tradition trumped efficiency as a way people guided their lives, in any event. The development of bureaucracy, in other words, was a functional feature of modern societies that allowed for the efficient management of large and growing populations. But bureaucracies have several dysfunctional aspects to them too, which your book describes. One of them is an anti-democratic tendency that takes hold as power and decision-making get concentrated into fewer and fewer hands at the top of what you might visualize as a pyramidal structure. This tendency was identified in the German sociologist Robert Michels' (1915) research as the so-called 'iron law of oligarchy,' and its consequences, whether in governments or corporations, can be the opposite of functional and "well-managed." Indeed, they can be disastrous! Considering the early 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, or any other recent contemporary news event you've followed, describe an example of how the head of some very large organization has made a decision that has been harmful—or otherwise negative—for large numbers of people who are part of that organization, or who are directly affected by it. In thinking about what example you want to discuss, include one in which the input of the many people 'down the pyramid,' who lack as much power, might have led to a better outcome.
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