Bereau - means small desks (French)

Kratein - means to rule (Greek)

Bureaucracy basically means rule by office
Bureaucracy is the collective organizational structure, procedures, protocols
and set of regulations in place to manage activity, usually in large
organizations and government. It is represented by standardized procedure
that guides the execution of most or all processes within the body, formal
division of powers, hierarchy and relationships, intended to anticipate needs
and improve efficiency.
A bureaucracy traditionally does not create but rather enacts it. Law, policy
and regulation normally originates from a leadership which creates the
bureaucracy to put them into practice. In reality, the interpretation and
execution of policy can lead to informal influence.
Four structural concepts are central to any definition of bureaucracy:
1. A well-defined division of administrative labor among persons and
offices,
2. A personal system with consistent patterns of recruitment and stable
linear careers,
3. A hierarchy among offices such that the authority and status are
differentially distributed among actors,
4. Formal and informal networks that connect organizational actors to one
another through flows of information and patterns of cooperation.
To help analyze the process of bureaucratization, which he saw as central to
modern capitalist societies, Weber in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, published
after his death in 1921, presents a model of what a bureaucracy would look
like if it existed in a pure form. In doing this he used the device of the ideal
type. Webers ideal type of bureaucracy is often taken to be the conceptual
starting point in organization theory and much of the effort expended by
sociologists and other social scientists to understand organizations has been
an attempt to refine or take issue with what Weber was taken to be implying
in its use.
In an ideal-type bureaucracy (that is, in an imagined pure case of the
phenomenon):
All operating rules and procedures are formally recorded;
Tasks are divided up and allocated to people with formally certified
expertise to carry them out;

 Activities are controlled and coordinated by officials organized in a

hierarchy of authority;
Communications and commands pass up or down the hierarchy without
missing out steps;
Posts are filled and promotions achieved by the best qualified people;
Office-holder posts constitute their only employment and the level of their
salary reflects their level in the hierarchy;
Posts cannot become the property or private territory of the office-holder,
the officers authority derives from their appointed office and not from their
person;
All decisions and judgments are made impersonally and neutrally, without
emotion, personal preference or prejudice.
Weber saw bureaucracy as a rational way for complex businesses and
governments to organize. Webers ideal type of bureaucracy is in no sense a
model of what he thought ought to be the case administratively. It is a device
to help us analytically by providing us with a sketch of an impossibly pure
and unachievable structure against which reality can be compared. Weber
was concerned to contrast characteristically modern forms of administration
with earlier forms.