Bureaucracy

The term bureaucracy refers to the growing tendency in modern societies to have power and influence embedded in institutions in the political, administrative, and economic realms. The term, academically popularized by Max Weber, points to the pervasive influence of diverse institutions in determining social and spatial outcomes in urban, suburban, and rural settings. Weber, concerned with the roots and sources of power in Western societies, argued that an ascendant bureaucratization of activities is a dominant characteristic of the modern era. Bureaucratic organization, characterized by layers of rules and regulations, casts of managers and gatekeepers, and the articulated prioritization of efficiency, is identified as a privileged instrument that governs local life.

Weber's notion of bureaucracy has been widely applied by human geographers to explain the control of resources in contemporary Western society and their social and spatial outcomes. For example, urban geographers have used this frame to understand patterns of residential differentiation and ghettoization in cities. Key gatekeepers, seen as controlling and managing scarce urban resources (e.g., mortgage loans, information on housing vacancies, government subsidies), are posited as powerful city operatives. Similarly, political geographers have used the bureaucracy notion to comprehend how political regimes in regions rely on a bureaucratic–organizational instrumentality to acquire legitimacy and assert political power. Bureaucracy here is simultaneously a method of resource allocation, a mechanism of political control, and a structure to organize the operation of institutions.

Most of the applications of bureaucracy by geographers have relied on an early rearticulation of the notion offered by sociologist Ray Pahl. This notion identifies the power and influence of local organizations whose members operate essentially autonomously and unconstrained by broader scale processes. A later version, also offered by Pahl, presents local government as the central source of organizational power in cities and society but whose members become increasingly interested in their own growth and perpetuation. This second notion, situating local organizations in a complex web of propelling forces, has been used less often by human geographers.