'Official Bureaucratic' Versus 'Political'
Value Choices:
Max Weber and Talcott Parsons
Larry B. Hill, University
of Oklahoma
In an often-quoted passage, Max Weber characterized decision making in a society in which his ideal type of bureaucracy predominated as follows:
The dominance of a spirit of formalistic impersonality: 'Sine ira et studio,' without hatred or passion, and hence without affection or enthusiasm. The dominant norms are concepts of straightforward duty without regard to personal considerations. Everyone is subject to formal equality of treatment; that is, everyone in the same empirical situation. This is the spirit in which the ideal official conducts his office.1
This prescription for treating all who have dealings with an agency with an impersonality or formal equality of treatment that puts "everyone in the same empirical position" is specified in laws, rules, and formal policies in the public agencies of all developed societies and in virtually all underdeveloped societies. These depersonalized values may be identified as official bureaucratic values.
Weber developed the methodology of the "ideal type," as a logically coherent device to capture the defining features of the things under study--in this case, bureaucracy. The ideal type of bureaucracy was not ideal in the sense that it was the kind of organization Weber preferred. It was not modeled after any particular entity, nor did it represent the average characteristics of the entities that he called bureaucracies.
The ideal type of bureaucracy was intended to be useful. Weber said that its function "is the comparison with empirical reality in order to establish its divergences or similarities … and to understand and explain them causally."2 Thus, the ideal type could serve as a measuring stick to be placed against real entities to note similarities and differences. In the present case, the job of the analyst thus becomes that of enquiring about the extent to which official, depersonalized values are the operative values for particular officials, agencies, and civil service systems at a variety of levels
As useful as Weber's focus on depersonalization as the appropriate value standard for his ideal type of bureaucracy may be, its application involves simply making a dichotomous evaluation: a bureaucratic action, or a series of actions, is based on either official bureaucratic norms or on unofficial norms. In order to provide a mechanism for undertaking a more complex assessment, I offer an ideal type of "official bureaucratic" versus "political" value choices that is derived from the pattern variables of Talcott Parsons.
Reworking The Parsonian Pattern Variables
A half-century ago, Parsons--who was a translator of Max Weber3 and the dean of American sociologists for more than a generation--developed a framework for analyzing specific actions at the individual level, at the institutional level, and at the social system level. Preparatory to taking any action, Parsons said, actors in a particular situation were "confronted by a series of major dilemmas of orientation," which he called pattern variables.4 Parsons defined the pattern variables as follows:
A pattern variable is a dichotomy, one side of which must be chosen by an actor before the meaning of a situation is determinate for him, and thus before he can act with respect to that situation. We maintain that there are only five basic pattern variables … and that … they constitute a system (italics in the original).5
Parsons argued that the objects of the situation "do not determine automatically the meaning of the situation." Instead, whether the actor chooses explicitly or only implicitly, a choice must be made on each pattern variable before the situation takes on any real meaning. Any action, then, "is characterized by a pattern of the five choices."6
I use the pattern variables somewhat differently from Parsons to create an ideal type of overall orientations toward administrative action or decision making. As indicated in the Figure, I call one of these types an official bureaucratic orientation and the second type a political orientation. Parsons probably would have labeled the second ideal type as featuring human or social values rather than political values. But when decisions are made within such an authoritative structure as a public bureaucracy and applied generally to citizens using the compulsion of the state, then the situation has become essentially political.7
Figure:
An Ideal Type of 'Bureaucratic' Vs. 'Political' Value Choices
| Bureaucratic Values | Political Values | |
| 1. | Universalism | Particularism |
| 2. | Achievement | Ascription |
| 3. | Affective Neutrality | Affectivity |
| 4. | Specificity | Diffuseness |
| 5. | Collectivity in Orientation | Self-Orientation |
Making 'Official Bureaucratic' Value Choices
(1) The first pattern variable features the dilemma of universalism or particularism. In a bureaucracy, the decision criterion of universalism involves impartiality--applying standard rules to everybody, treating people equally--regardless of race, sex, religion, political orientation, or any other criteria. If a special relationship exists between the bureaucrat and another person (let us say that an applicant for a governmental benefit is a member of the bureaucrat's political party), then the bureaucrat is supposed to make a decision while ignoring the relationship or step aside and let a colleague take over so as to avoid a conflict of interest.
Particularism is the opposite value standard, the political value standard. Particularism has to do with favoritism, with giving special treatment to certain people. Particularistic decisions are made on the basis of family, kinship groups, constituents, ideology, or similar values.
(2) The second pattern variable is the choice between achievement or ascription. Under bureaucratic achievement, we value the proven ability and the performance of the individual involved. The opinions of a Ph.D. in nuclear physics may be appropriately considered, for example, by an agency reviewing the safety of a nuclear reactor.
Under political ascription, on the other hand, we pay attention to who that person is, to his or her generalized background, status, or position. We do not base decisions on what that person may have achieved that is irrelevant to the decision at hand. Giving serious consideration to the opinions of a high-status person--let us say to those of a so called "Boston Brahmin," who became a Navy Admiral after earning a Ph.D. in art history, but who has no background in banking or in law--about the legality of a bank merger would be an example of ascription.
(3) The third pattern variable has to do with emotions. We shall distinguish between affective neutrality, the bureaucratic value, and affectivity, the political value. In a bureaucratic situation, emotional neutrality is the key; the values are instrumental ones. The bureaucrat is supposed to find out the objective facts and act on the basis of them rather than emotion--"Just the facts, Ma'am," as Jack Webb often insisted on Dragnet. Bureaucrats are always supposed to withhold their own emotions. Social workers, for example, are often required to attend workshops to develop skills in maintaining emotional distance from clients. Furthermore, if thoroughly trained and socialized bureaucrats should be confronted with an outburst of emotion from clients, the bureaucrats may cringe, feeling that the expression of anger--as well as such other emotions as joy, sadness, and frustration--is inappropriate in the official setting.
On the other hand, the appropriate political value features an emotional orientation toward the situation. Free expression of feelings, of love or hate or intimacy, would be allowed. And people's ideological orientations to situations might be valued.
(4) The fourth pattern variable concerns the issue of specificity or diffuseness. Bureaucracy involves the creation of specific and segmented relationships. The bureaucratic caseworker--that is the term, caseworker--is not dealing with an individual qua individual: the caseworker must repackage that individual as a case and must ignore most of the individual's other aspects. If the bureaucrat's job is to write speeding tickets, the motorist's status as a mother or a decorated war hero, for example, is irrelevant. The police officer's appropriate scope of interest in the person is limited to whatever specific factors are set out in the official jurisdiction.
In the political realm, however, the appropriate value is diffuseness. One deals with the whole person. This means that a broad, undefined range of obligations covers the individual's entire scope of activity. Everything becomes personal, no matter what is under discussion, because it is all connected: People must not be segmented.
(5) The final pattern variable is the dilemma of being oriented either toward the collectivity or toward the self. 8 Laws specify that bureaucrats are supposed to think of society broadly and do their duty without considering the repercussions on themselves. The political orientation, on the other hand, is selfish: What's in it for me? How could this decision affect me? One of the most common complaints against bureaucracy concerns its members' alleged pursuit of their self-interest.
According to the ideal type, an administrative actor automatically would have to embrace the bureaucratic choice on all five dimensions. Some critics have suggested that each of the pattern variables should be considered to be a continuum rather than a dichotomy. William Mitchell's conclusion defending Parsons's choice on this matter seems sound to me: each pattern variable consists of dichotomous choices, but decisions may reflect varying degrees of intensity or commitment.9
What are the consequences of hewing to the ideal type's official bureaucratic value choices in making decisions? Defenders of the ideal type would argue that following it is a recipe for making decisions that are thoroughly just from the viewpoint of individuals and beyond criticism from the viewpoint of the political system. But critics would argue that the "dysfunctions" of bureaucracy identified by Robert Merton would prevail: formalism, rigidity, goal displacement, and over-conformity.10
Making 'Political' Value Choices
Regardless of the merits of employing official bureaucratic norms, bureaucrats sometimes make "political" choices on one pattern variable or another, as the following hypothetical situations illustrate:
How prevalent is the making of decisions within public bureaucracies on the basis of such personalized, political values? I argue that official, bureaucratic values dominate more often than is frequently assumed. Nonetheless, political considerations are often important in bureaucratic decision making. Sometimes they are so significant that we cannot predict in advance whether bureaucratic or political values will be the more important. Ordinary decision making in American bureaucracy features a complex and often confusing conflict between bureaucratic and political values.
Especially from the point of view of superior bureaucratic officials, making some decisions on the basis of political values affecting the organization may seem to be a responsibility more important than the occasional sacrifice of fairness to an individual. We should recall that many political appointees have been placed at strategic points within American bureaucracies and given the mission of ensuring political responsiveness to the party or individuals. Nonetheless, because making decisions on a political basis violates official bureaucratic norms, such violations may create tensions and conflicts for the organization.
Especially if action-level bureaucrats come to believe that many decisions are made on political grounds, they may lose faith in the organization's integrity and become demoralized. Furthermore, adverse decisions that seem illegitimately political to those outsiders who deal with the organization--as clients, contractors, and so forth--may cause them to distrust the organization's objectiveness. Such outsiders may even bring complaints to legislators or the media or court actions alleging violations of official bureaucratic values.
Finally, using "political" rather than "bureaucratic" values may be dangerous for the bureaucratic decision maker. Although bureaucrats may feel that in using political values for decision making they are merely doing away with red tape and helping their organization, they may expose themselves to political danger. The possibility that their superiors or subordinates, clients, or internal monitors (such as auditors and inspectors general) could take action--including court action--against them is real. All in all, the choice of political over official bureaucratic values may have serious consequences for bureaucrats and bureaucracies.
Conclusion
For the most part, the preceding discussion of official bureaucratic versus political values has assumed an individual level of analysis, where justice considerations were at the forefront. In such cases, concluding that official bureaucratic values normally should prevail seems uncontroversial. But is that conclusion so clear if a broader focus is taken, at the level of the organization? For example, let us consider the following hiring scenario in which an agency's mission is to assist the members of a minority community in developmental efforts. Assume that the bureaucratic decision maker has been assigned to hire a person who will be responsible for outreach to that community and that the person's job will be to "sell" the community on the virtues of the agency's projects. Assume also that the formal job description was written by officials at higher levels of the agency, who made extensive community development experience an important qualification but who did not require that the successful candidate have close linkages with the target community. Further assume that one of the two finalists for the position is an integral member of the community in question, but her previous community development experience is slender. In contrast, the second finalist has impressive experience in community development, but her links with the community are scant.
Looking at the situation from the individual level and applying official bureaucratic values, hiring the first finalist--whose experience clearly makes her the more qualified according to the formal job description--seems the most fair decision. But if the decision maker is strongly oriented toward performing the developmental mission, he may decide to weigh the second finalist's close linkages with the community more heavily than did his superiors who wrote the job description using normal civil service criteria. If choosing the second finalist for the job is unfair to the first finalist, is that degree of unfairness counterbalanced by the supposed cultural advantages that the second finalist would bring to the developmental effort? Such dilemmas--which may require a delicate balancing among competing values, both of which seem desirable--often arise in public administration.
The choice between official bureaucratic and political values seems increasingly likely to become problematic in the future. I shall conclude by mentioning examples of two ways this may come about. First, I suspect that the values dilemma will be accentuated as the use of contractors to deliver services previously delivered by governmental bureaucrats becomes more prevalent. For example, when unprofessional, "faith-based" organizations contract to provide job-placement services, which decision values shall they use? Even if a contract should specifically allow them to emphasize--at least to a certain degree--their particularistic religious values, will the public regard their decisions as legitimate?
Second, I suspect that the values dilemma will be accentuated as decision making by political appointees in federal agencies becomes more apparent. Recent administrations have increased the numbers and responsibilities of political appointees, but we have never developed a political theory that articulates and validates their functions--at least, we have no theory that goes beyond the vague generalization that they are somehow supposed to make bureaucracies more responsive and accountable to politicians and indirectly to the public. But in concrete terms does this mean that it is permissible for the political appointees of the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department to decide to go easy on one corporation's proposed merger while being tough on another simply because the former corporation gave a large contribution to the party in power while the latter did not? Less high-profile cases than this one raise the same issues, for example, the decisions about which aspirants should be awarded the thousands of federal contracts awarded each year. How prevalent are political values in making such decisions?
I do not believe the public insists that all bureaucratic decisions must be made on the basis of official bureaucratic values, but I argue that if the public comes to believe that most decisions are not made on that basis, most of the time, a bureaucratic legitimation crisis may be precipitated.
1. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology [1914-29], ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), vol. 1, 225.
2. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. and trans. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), 43; the essay quoted was written in 1904. For a fuller discussion of the ideal type, see Thomas Burger, Max Weber's Theory of Concept Formation: History, Laws, and Ideal Types (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1976).
3. See Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1947).
4. Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shills, eds., Toward a General Theory of Action: Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), 76.
5. Ibid., 77.
6. Ibid., 76.
7. Whether Parsons would have endorsed my enterprise is unknown. Perhaps because he did not wish to be judgmental about the choices an actor might make, he never lined up the pattern variables so as to consistently separate what I call the official bureaucratic value labels from the political value labels as presented in the Figure. Instead, Parsons mixed them so that in one treatment (ibid., 77), he led the listing of three of the pattern variables with what I call the political prong of the dilemma, but then reversed course and led with the bureaucratic prong of the other two pattern variables. In another treatment, published the same year, he led with the bureaucratic prong of three of the pattern variables, but led with the political prong of the remaining two pattern variables; Talcott Parsons, The Social System (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951), 67. I bear complete responsibility for the direction I take the ideas of both Parsons and Weber.
8. Parsons later removed the collectivity-orientation versus self-orientation dilemma from the list of pattern variables, saying he had concluded that the distinction was at a somewhat different level of analysis from the other four pattern variables. He also added a new pattern variable, the consummatory versus instrumental distinction, which features the dilemma between ends and means. "Pattern Variables Revisited: A Response to Robert Dubin," American Sociological Review 25 (August 1960); the citation is to the reprinting of the article in Talcott Parsons, Sociological Theory and Modern Society (New York: Free Press, 1967), 215. Because the collectivity-orientation versus self-orientation dilemma is central to the exploration of bureaucratic decision making and the consummatory versus instrumental dilemma seems to me to be at a different level of analysis from the other pattern variables (which Parsons granted) and also not highly relevant to the personal dilemmas of bureaucratic decision making, I have decided to stick with the original set of pattern variables.
9. William C. Mitchell, Sociological Analysis and Politics: The Theories of Talcott Parsons (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 32, 107.
10. See Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, revised and enlarged edition (New York: Free Press, 1957), chapter 6.
