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Bureaucrat
An individual who works for a bureaucracy, a large hierarchical organization or government agency. The label bureaucrat holds a negative connotation, implying a worker who is routine in his tasks and lacks independent thought and creativity. According to Max Weber (1991), a bureaucrat
in the great majority of cases is only a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism … entrusted with specialized tasks and normally the mechanism cannot be put into motion or arrested by him, but only from the very top. (p. 228)
The first known use of the term was attributed to the French civil servant and physiocrat Vincent de Gournay (1712–1759) by his contemporaries. It was first used in English in 1818. The term is western European in origin (bureau [office] in French and ...