Works
- Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tübingen, 1922
- Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1978
In Organizational Structures
Known for
Bureaucracy and rational-legal authority
Ideas
Bureaucracy as the ideal type of rational-legal authority. Administration by fixed jurisdictional areas ordered by rules, a hierarchy of offices, written documents and files, officials selected on technical qualifications, and calculable rules applied without regard for persons, which Weber held technically superior to any other form of organization. Caveat: An ideal type, not a description of any organization; the Aston studies concluded that a single bureaucratic type is no longer useful (Pugh and colleagues 1968). Only passages of the 1978 edition were read.
Bureaucracy as rational-legal administration. Weber described bureaucracy, with its hierarchy of offices, written rules, files, and trained officials appointed by qualification, as the most technically efficient form of administration under rational-legal authority. Caveat: An ideal type, not a description of any one organization; the Aston studies found its features vary independently.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.