Ancient State Organizations: Were they Bureaucratic?

• In Event: 2112 - Open Session for Rationality and Society

Abstract

Weber’s view of bureaucracy, long the dominant one across the social sciences (Roth and Wittich 1968; Rudolph and Rudolph 1979), sees bureaucracy as welding technical training to strict subordination to form an efficient structure. However, there is a basic discontinuity in Weber's formulations of bureaucratic structure.
He lays out necessary conditions of bureaucratic power, but ignores any explicit theoretical mechanism connecting those conditions to the exercise of power in and through the bureaucratic structure. This paper seeks to remedy this oversite in Weber, and to establish that technical expertise in bureaucracy is not a unique, modern phenomena. We first discuss officials, ancient and modern. Our goal is not to prove that all ancient officials were technical experts for they were not. Instead, through two notable examples, we seek to show that ancient state organizations could and did deploy technical expertise. Turning to modern organizations and having noted that by no means are all officials technical experts, we explain that not being experts is not an accident. The paper then turns to issues of structure first looking to two contributions from economics. We ask whether either can explain how bureaucratic power is exercised. Then a theoretic model for how hierarchy works is presented. That model, which is experimentally grounded, links Weber’s conditions to power exercise in and through the chain of command embedded in the hierarchy. The model is then used to determine how power is centralized and how it is extended over substantial social distances through a series of social relations. Finally, we ask whether the application of that model explains why the single bureaucratic form developed independently at distinct times and places.

Authors

• David Willer, University of South Carolina

• Pamela E. Emanuelson, North Dakota State University