Maybe It Is Time to Rediscover Bureaucracy

This article questions the fashionable ideas that bureaucratic organization is an obsolescent, undesirable, and non-viable form of administration and that there is an inevitable and irreversible paradigmatic shift towards market-or network-organization. In contrast, the paper argues that contemporary democracies are involved in another round in a perennial debate and ideological struggle over what are desirable forms of administration and government: that is, a struggle over institutional identities and institutional balances. The argument is not that bureaucratic organization is a panacea and the answer to all challenges of public administration. Rather, bureaucratic organization is part of a repertoire of…