plan and control the economy. In socialist countries, it is the state
that controls the major means of production; and this implies the
necessity for central planning. Thus many state institutions have
been created to run and control the economy. By the nature of the
magnitude of their functions, such state institutions have become
as big as other organisations in capitalist countries. In the
developing world, organisations have also sprung up though not
as many as in the previous cases mentioned above. But some of
them are big enough to pose problems which all organisations
pose.

So with the growth and expansion of the size and complexity of
organisations in the world today, a lot of problems have cropped
up. Increasing organisational size and complexity has brought
about the growth of the bureaucratic apparatus. A lot of literature
on organisations has been written. Max Weber,* for exampie, sees
this bureaucratic phenomenon in organisations as a rational way
of achieving efficiency. According to him, an organisation is
characterised 'by a division of work into various areas of
specialised jurisdiction and competence. It has also a strict hierar-
chy of authority with a system of superior and subordinate role
relationship in which the superior becomes the only source of in-
fluence and authority upon the subordinate. Formal rules and
procedures are laid down which aim at governing the running of
the organisation. Impersonality aims at separating ‘office’ from
personal possessions and personal attachments. Robert Michels® is
another student of organisations. His observation of the working
of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and trade unions
which were supposedly aimed at equality in participation led him
to formulate his famous Iron Law of Oligarchy. Through his ob-
servations of the working of these institutions he concluded that
all kinds of organisations whether or not they aim at equal par-
ticipation among its members, tend to develop a kind of oligar-
chical structure with a hierarchy whereby the top leaders develop
an in-built mechanism which puts them in a powerful position
over the people below and they try to perpetuate that system. He
sees the development of oligarchies as inevitable because the top
leadership in any organisation do possess the skill and expertise in
decision-making and have access to information over others.

This brief analysis has tried to show the tendendcies
organisations develop— that of bureaucratism with a powerful

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