"'Bureau' (French, borrowed into German) is a desk, or by extension an office (as in 'I will be at the office tomorrow'; 'I work at the Bureau of Statistics'). 'Bureaucracy' is rule conducted from a desk or office, i.e. by the preparation and dispatch of written documents - or, these days, their electronic equivalent."
"It is a servant of government, a means by which a monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, or other form of government, rules."
"The king was accompanied also by 'clerks', i.e. clergy, who could read and write, who took along a chest containing records and writing materials; the modern bureaucracy developed from this."
"He also points out, not only government services but also political parties, churches, educational institutions, and private businesses, and many other institutions have bureaucracies."
"There have in history been governments whose members made no distinction in resources, income, expenditure, etc. between public and private."
- Patrimonial (Roman law term, properties bought and sold)
"The ideal lying behind this is that if the official has any source of income apart from a salary he will not reliably follow the rules. Reliable following of the official rules is one of the highest values in a bureaucracy."
"Bureaucrats do not own the 'means of administration' - the computers, the furniture, the files, etc."
"Weber speaks of 'credentialism', the preoccupation evident in modern societies with formal educational qualifications. All these things - credentials, fixed salary, tenure, stability of staffing, Weber incorporates into his ideal type. They are all required, he believes, for the efficient functioning of an administrative machine."
"Another feature is the impersonal application of general rules, both to the outsiders the organization deals with, and to its own staff. The Taxation Commissioner's staff impersonally, objectively, apply the rules to the taxpayer, and their own duties and rights within the organization are defined by rules applied to them impersonally by their superiors. In Weber's mind this is the most important feature of bureaucracy. It underlies the features we have been commenting on up to this point: bureaucrats do not own their equipment or their job, and receive a fixed salary etc., because these things ensure reliable rule-following."
"There are three types: rational, traditional and charismatic. Charismatic authority is regarded as legitimate, and works, because followers are personally devoted to the 'gifted' leader. Traditional authority is regarded as legitimate because everyone has always obeyed whoever was in the leader's position, and no one thinks of disputing his authority. Rational authority is the 'rule of law': it exists in a community in which there is a moral attitude of respect for the law as such, or because the law has been arrived at in a way that is regarded as legitimate. "
"Goal-rational behaviour is whatever course of conduct is well-adapted as a means to one's end."
"Rationality of actions is not always determined by their effectiveness in furthering goals, but sometimes by some other sort of relation to values that are not goals, and that goals and other values also can be rational or irrational. For example, to tell a lie may be an effective means of furthering one's goals, but it may violate a moral value, a value that truth-telling serves in some sense other than as a means to achieve a goal; and truthfulness is not a goal, but a 'value' of some other sort"
"'value-rationality', the rationality of goals (and not merely as means to some ulterior goal) and other values, and of actions in their relation (otherwise than as means) to some value."
"Bureaucracy is rational in the following: 'Experience tends universally to show that the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization... is... capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency, and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of carrying out imperative control over human beings."
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