Is Bureaucracy a Paradigm? Rediscovering Weber’s Ideal-type Scheme for Public Administration

For a decade, Weber’s concept of bureaucracy has been under attack with the other principles of traditional public administration. However, a rediscovery of Weber’s interpretive approach to bureaucracy shows that contemporary criticism of his concept is based on a misunderstanding of his ideal-type construction and its analytic function in social research. Thus, exploring an effective way to relocate Weber’s bureaucracy as a deductive, contextual, analytic concept is still instructive for self-reflection as well as agenda setting of contemporary public administration.