Bureaucracy

A bureaucracy (/bjuːˈrɒkrəsi/) is "a body of non-elective government officials" and/or "an administrative policy-making group". Historically, bureaucracy was government administration managed by departments staffed with non-elected officials. Today, bureaucracy is the administrative system governing any large institution. The public administration in many countries is an example of a bureaucracy.

Since being coined, the word "bureaucracy" has developed negative connotations. Bureaucracies have been criticized as being inefficient, convoluted, or too inflexible to individuals. The dehumanizing effects of excessive bureaucracy became a major theme in the work of German-language writer Franz Kafka, and are central to his novels The Trial and The Castle. The elimination of unnecessary bureaucracy is a key concept in modern managerial theory and has been an issue in some political campaigns.

Others have noted the necessity of bureaucracies in modern life. The German sociologist Max Weber argued that bureaucracy constitutes the most efficient and rational way in which one can organize human activity, and that systematic processes and organized hierarchies were necessary to maintain order, maximize efficiency and eliminate favoritism. Weber also saw unfettered bureaucracy as a threat to individual freedom, in which an increase in the bureaucratization of human life can trap individuals in an impersonal "iron cage" of rule-based, rational control.

The term "bureaucracy" is French in origin, and combines the French word bureau – desk or office – with the Greek word κράτος kratos – rule or political power. It was coined in the mid-18th century by the French economist Jacques Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay, and was a satirical pejorative from the outset. Gournay never wrote the term down, but was later quoted at length in a letter from a contemporary:

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