By Kevin Stoda, Germany
In an era of big and bigger governance and at a time when companies, especially financial institutions, need to be managed better, the position of bureaucracy and managing-management are ever more seen as more important than ever when trying to comprehend how modern society currently functions.
Due to this shift or growth in many branches of government over the past decade, even the Republican Party in the USA is now seen as a big spender and friend to bureaucratic growth. Click here.
Traditionally modern rhetoric in the media and in the political landscape have primarily looked down in disdain at overblown management (and over-management) sectors or at ballooning bureaucracies and their machinery (or chicaner), which have appeared over the past decades to have grown like weeds on a Kansas landscape during rainy season. click here.
Interestingly, this growing fascination with growing organization and bureaucratic power has occurred at a time when firms and companies have received and demanded ever more hands-often governance.
On the one hand, at the same time many firms and corporate leaders have made careers out of trying to make companies lean and tough-often by laying people off (i.e. putting them on the government payroll). click here.
Similarly, politicians have made their own careers by bashing bureaucracy. However, in actuality, most, like the now infamous former U.S. President, George W. Bush, actually have grown bureaucracies faster than any of their predecessors. click here.
In the midst of this phenomena, management and organizational theorists have suddenly once again grown to defend bureaucracy in the old school vain, which Max Weber made famous over a century ago. These sage evaluators of business and governance say that the common good is often better managed than simply left to nature or to the so-called free market. click here.
On the other hand, there are still certainly authors who criticize the growth in governments as having the tendency to create a negative relationship to the proper and fair functioning of (1) national constitutions and (2) human- and international relationships in general. click here.
Let's look at the role of marriage and international marriages and see how bureaucracy often does not work towards the public good, especially in a nation state like Germany--which actually is embedded quite firmly in a greater union or marriage to the European Union membership (and evolving treaties, i.e. treaties which are acting as constitutions currently).
INTERNATONAL MARRIAGE IN GERMANY TODAY
Why is marriage in Germany today a good example of lack of attention of bureaucrats to the common good?
First of all, the father of all bureaucratic studies is Max Weber, a German Sociologist and theorist from the 19th century.
Second, up till this very era, within the European Union there have been many different lands with their own laws on marriage contracts--and the right to have a spouse--or the right to even bring one's spouse across international borders.
Third, Germany, being itself a federal state consists of various lands and cities ( or layers of governance like in the USA), also recognizes the role of cities and counties (called Bezirk or Landeskreis) to undertake the approval of marriage licenses and to allow for the integration of settlers from across Europe and beyond.
For example, final approval for a family visa in my city is undertaken at the Integration Office of the city where I live-and not at some larger bureaucratic center further up the levels of federal government hierarchies.
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