White Collar by C. Wright Mills — Read

As an epithet for governmental waste and red tape, the word ‘bureaucracy' is a carry-over from the heroic age of capitalism, when the middle-class entrepreneur was in revolt against mercantile company and monarchist dynasty. That time is now long past, but the epithet persists in the service of different aims.

In its present common meaning, ‘bureaucracy' is inaccurate and misleading for three major reasons: (1) When the corporation official objects to ‘bureaucracy' he means of course the programs of the Federal Government, and then only in so far as they seem to be against the interests of his own private business bureaucracy. (2) Most of the waste and inefficiency associated in popular imagery with ‘bureaucracy' is, in fact, a lack of strict and complete bureaucratization. The ‘mess,' and certainly the graft, of the U. S. Army, are more often a result of a persistence of the entrepreneurial outlook among its personnel than of any bureaucratic tendencies as such. Descriptively, bureaucracy refers to a hierarchy of offices or bureaus, each with an assigned area of operation, each employing a staff having specialized qualifications. So defined, bureaucracy is the most efficient type of social organization yet devised. (3) Government bureaucracies are, in large part, a public consequence of private bureaucratic developments, which by centralizing property and equipment have been the pace setter of the bureaucratic trend. The very size of modern business, housing the technological motors and financial say-so, compels the rise of centralizing organizations of formal rule and rational subdivisions in all sectors of society, most especially in government.