Bureaucracy and Centralization: An Examination of Organizational Structure

Roger Mansfield This article considers the Aston group's contention that Weber's concept of the bureaucratic type is no longer useful. In reviewing the group's methodology, it is concluded that the main variables in their research are scalar quantities, not vector quantities, as they suggest. A number of reinterpretations of the Aston variables are presented and the abandonment of bureaucratic type is found to be premature. The the relationship of bureaucracy to centralization of decision making is examined based on results from two empirical studies.