Question

We do a lot of administrative work and paperwork. Tell us a little about your experience documenting your work and your feelings about "bureaucracy

Answer 1

ABOUT BUREAUCRACY;

A bureaucracy is a large organization composed of appointed officials in which authority is divided among several managers. Bureaucracy is an obvious feature of all modern societies, but American governmental bureaucracy is distinctive in three ways. First, political authority over the bureaucracy is shared among several institutions. Second, most federal agencies share their functions with agencies of state and local government. Finally, America's adversary culture means that the actions of bureaucrats are often fought in court.

Max Weber argued that the bureaucratic organizational form is characterized by six features:

1) Specialization and Division of Labor;

2) Hierarchical Authority Structures;

3) Rules and Regulations;

4) Technical Competence Guidelines;

5) Impersonality and Personal Indifference;

6) A Standard of Formal, Written

This review surveys anthropological and other social research on bureaucratic documents. The fundamental insight of this literature is that documents are not simply instruments of bureaucratic organizations, but rather are constitutive of bureaucratic rules, ideologies, knowledge, practices, subjectivities, objects, outcomes, even the organizations themselves. It explores the reasons why documents have been late to come under ethnographic scrutiny and the implications for our theoretical understandings of organizations and methods for studying them. The review argues for the great value of the study of paper-mediated documentation to the study of electronic forms, but it also highlights the risk of an exclusive focus on paper, making anthropology marginal to the study of core bureaucratic practices in the manner of earlier anthropology.