Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy has two principal meanings in contemporary social science. In the tradition established by Max Weber the term is an ideal type that refers to rational authority and rule-based organization, as compared to traditional or charismatic authority and organization. In political science, terms like "the bureaucracy" and "the federal bureaucracy" or "state bureaucracy" largely embrace the Weberian meaning and adds an additional connotation of systems of formally or rule-based coordination between distinct or distinguishable organizations.