Max Weber's classic essay “Bureaucracy” (1946) delineates some of the characteristics of modern organizations that distinguish them from traditional forms of administration. These characteristics include division of labor, hierarchy of authority, written rules and regulations, and the like. The surface attributes of bureaucracy identified by Weber are not to be confused with its causes, however. In comparing traditional with bureaucratic means of administration, the latter based on belief in rational–legal authority, Weber was clearly suggesting that bureaucratization is but one aspect of the historical trend toward rationalization in the development of all institutional forms in modern societies. The substitution of authority based on rules for authority based arbitrarily on persons is central to the development of bureaucracy. Weber identifies other preconditions of bureaucratization, including a money economy that allows calculability of results and widespread literacy. To this list one might add such possible causes of bureaucratization as urbanization, mobility of resources, and religious beliefs permitting trust among strangers (see Stinchcombe 1965). The relative importance of these causes of bureaucratization is perhaps of less significance than the fact that they are external to organizations and arise largely as a result of historical processes. Rational–legal authority, cash economies, widespread literacy, and other conditions contributing to the development of bureaucratic forms are characteristics of whole societies that may change over time but need not vary from organization to organization in a society at any one point.

Contemporary research on organizations has apparently overlooked this fact in seeking to explain characteristics of bureaucracies in terms of internal characteristics while ignoring the changes in the larger social and political environments that Weber thought central to the growth of modern organizations.