What are the disadvantages of traditional hierarchical organization?

Rational bureaucracy is also known as sectional or bureaucratic system. He was proposed by the German sociologist Max Weber.

I. Rationality as the theoretical presupposition of the theory of hierarchy "rationality" (rationality) or "legitimacy" (legitimacy) is the central concept of Weber's political sociology. It can be said that his political theory actually centers on these two concepts, and is a further derivation and play on them. Rationality is an important doctrinal presupposition of Weber's sectional theory.

Weber believed that any kind of rule that is in accordance with the needs has a rational basis. Since the hierarchical system can operate stably and present a hierarchical power matrix relationship, it must also have some rationality as its realization premise. According to him, the hierarchical system is an expression of the relationship between the exercise of particular powers and their subordination. The possibility of a command, or all commands, with a particular content being obeyed by a particular group of people can be called "domination", where domination does not include purely violent control, and thus appears to be more limited to voluntary obedience. Voluntary obedience is also based on the "belief system" that forms the atmosphere of personal values. As an individual, he must y identify with the belief system in order to achieve consistency and continuity of action without causing inner tension, and ultimately to obtain voluntary obedience. Weber regarded the system of individual voluntary obedience as a system of rationality or legitimacy, and thus his understanding of a system excludes value judgment. That is to say, reasonableness is not expressed in the distinction between good and bad facts, but rather in whether or not it is recognized by the people in their beliefs, or rather, the individual maintains the belief that an order is a legitimate order, which is the "legitimacy" of the order or the reason why it exists. Supported by the belief in legitimacy, any order from authority will be obeyed by the individual, regardless of whether the order comes from the ruler personally, or in the form of an abstract law, regulation, etc., produced by contract or agreement.

Such a source of legitimacy or belief in justification can be divided into two broad categories. One category is subjective legitimacy, which includes emotional legitimacy (mostly expressed as emotional proximity, affinity), value rationality legitimacy (the belief that an order reflects the aesthetic, ethical or other values of the individual), and religious legitimacy (derived from the recognition of the view that order is needed for salvation); and the second category is what is known as objective legitimacy, which includes habitual legitimacy (the acquiescence to the fact that it has become a process or a recurrence) (acquiescence to what has become a process or a recurring fact, as well as a psychological sense that can be expressed as a herd mentality that derives primarily from external pressures), and legal justification (obedience to the legal system, whether internal or external). Under these five types of justificatory beliefs, the direction of development from the heart to action can be discerned into four different types of action: (1) the emotional type of action (emotional justification); (2) the value-justificatory type of action (including value-justificatory and religious-justificatory justification); (3) the traditional type of action (customary justificatory justification); and (4) the purposive justificatory type of action (legal justificatory justificatory). justification).

The analysis of the types of action of actors became the basis of Weber's social order, and his view of social systems, including his understanding of hierarchy, largely grew out of it. Through the following analysis we will be able to see, Weber according to different types of action, the stratification system for further screening, he often despite the positivist tendency in the evaluation of political issues, but still on the different stratification system to make value judgments, as if this is contrary to his value-neutral analysis of the attitude of the original intention. In Weber's view, sectionalism may refer only to the sectionalism of modern societies; for other societies, typical sectionalism does not exist, or at least is crippled.

Second, the command-subordination type as the analytic mechanism of the theory of stratification In Weber, the command-subordination type often means is the type of domination, which in turn is tightly connected with the type of action. According to him, different types of action form the basis of different types of domination and develop three mutually independent forms of domination, which are legitimized domination based on a traditional background, legitimized domination established by personal charisma, and legitimized domination established by means of legal legitimacy, which are respectively summarized by Weber as the traditional type of domination, the "Karisma " type of rule and juridical type of rule. These three forms of rule can in turn be referred to as the three command-submission types.

In the first command-submission type, individuals obey a leader out of time-honored loyalty. The leader is believed to have power because the leader himself and his ancestors have always been in the position of ruler, and the ruler has the authority to be obeyed by others because of his traditionally recognized position of dominance. Patriarchal and hereditary systems are prominent representatives of this type. The command-submission type, which relies on extraordinary charisma, is the most unstable and changeable of the three forms. Its submissives have feelings of awe and total loyalty to the ruler, believing that the leader is endowed with extraordinary endowments, extraordinary temperament, or magical talents, and believing that he is able to show his submissives the direction of action, or even to perform miracles, because of his gifts of enlightenment and metaphor. In the juridical command-obedience type, the status of the ruler is defined by written law, in which case the individual's obedience to the ruler is not based on descent, heredity, or emotional attachment, but rather on recognition of the reality of the hierarchy in accordance with accepted law. Obedience is not personalized to the individual, but is primarily manifested in obedience to a position defined by law. Thus, here the command-obedience type has been objectified, and in all political relations, the rejection of tradition or the "exorcism of witchcraft" has become the established social law, and the system of political structures has been completely depersonalized.

Weber clearly favored the latter type of command-submission. He argues that all three different types of command-submission may have produced bureaucratization, or stratification, of administrative life, and that in the pre-modern forms of rule, the traditional and the charismatic, stratification was once evident in a number of cases. For example, medieval Gothic architecture certainly had structural stress considerations (it required the creation of sectionalized institutions to deal specifically with these issues); the rationalized forms of bookkeeping in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, as well as in China and India, are similar facts. Even in terms of state politics, many pre-modern social formations already organized themselves through well-developed and large bureaucracies, as in Egypt during the New Empire, China since the Qin Dynasty, and so on. However, all pre-modern bureaucracies can be seen as irrational forms of rule, and as such they are not truly programmed typical of sectional administrations. In ancient China, for example, the mobility of intellectuals to the bureaucracy was realized through the imperial examination, and the promotion and dismissal of officials reflected the internal mobility of the bureaucracy, yet officials were evaluated primarily on the basis of ethical relativism and loyalty to the emperor. Here, familiarity with the Confucian canon and humanistic upbringing was paramount, with officials almost entirely avoiding technical and scientific support for their positions and authority, and lacking administrative expertise in the extreme. Since the basis for measuring the behavior of officials by ethicist relative standards is generally vague, the official's position in the system depends on the attitude of the individual supervisor, thus greatly developing personal dependence. "This is the reason for the anti-bureaucratic and tendency toward hereditary systems that characterize this Chinese administration, which in turn explains its coarseness and technical backwardness."