Essay 1: What are the characteristics of “bureaucracy” as defined by Weber?
Max Weber, a German sociologist, proposed that bureaucracy was the most effective and rational model that private commercials and civic offices would function in. Weber’s bureaucratic ideologies swayed generations of business heads and figureheads properly into the 20th era. While Weber’s ideologies insisted on efficiency, it is not necessarily the best practice for figureheads to execute. In addition, Weber was nothing like how office heads are presently because his management theory (bureaucratic theory) emphasized strict rules and a steady dissemination of power. If Weber were alive, he would have criticized the current executives, most of whom are flexible to new notions and flexible working arrangements, for their leadership styles.
Nevertheless, Weber thought that bureaucracy was the most effective manner to set up and control a corporation and vital for bigger organizations to acquire maximum productivity with many workers and job tasks. In an ultimate bureaucracy, every person is treated equitably, and each staff’s areas of proficiency clearly categorize work roles. A well-defined hierarchical management structure backs this up, offering precise lines of communication and division of labor based on the layers of management one operated in. Advancements in the corporations are determined wholly on qualifications and successes rather than private connections; thereby, he argued that work ecologies should always be professional and objective and that work ties should be discouraged firmly. Generally, Weber’s ideal bureaucracy prefers efficacies, uniformities, and a precise dissemination of power.
For that reason, there are six vital characteristics of bureaucracy, according to Weber. Task specialization or labor divisions is the first characteristic, and Weber felt that division of labor was the best tool to promote the timely completion of tasks at the highest level of skills. Therefore, tasks in Weber’s perfect corporation are categorized into sections based on team member’s proficiencies and areas of specialization. Workers and departments have precisely defined functions and prospects in which they are responsible exclusively for the work they do best. This is intended to amplify effectiveness for the corporation, and overstepping one’s tasks, such as offering new notions outside one’s department’s scope, is largely glared upon. The other bureaucracy characteristic is the hierarchical management framework, and in this, Weber proposed that management should be arranged into layers, with each layer being responsible for its team’s enactments. Weber was certain that each layer of management should offer directions to the layers below them while being subject to the control of those above them. Therefore, people at the top management hierarchies should have the most control, while those at the bottom levels should have the least control. Thus, this ranked framework precisely outlines lines of communications, delegations, and the division of job tasks (Fleming, 2020).
Furthermore, Weber also proposed the formal selection rules in an ideal corporation as a characteristic of bureaucratic management. He was confident that workers should be chosen based on their technical expertise and proficiencies, which are gained via learning, experiences, or training that is no other aspect should be considered. Conversely, since employees are paid for their services, and their services are categorized by job positions, a worker’s monthly wage is wholly dependent on their positions. Besides, contract names are also wholly influenced by the company’s guidelines and regulations, and workers have no possession interest in a corporation. Similarly, effective and uniform requirements are another bureaucratic characteristic that insists that workers should always know precisely what is required of them. In the ideal corporation, the regulations are undoubtedly well-defined and rigorously adopted. In the end, this encourages uniformity within the corporation and keeps the office running effortlessly and effectively as it should be. Additionally, if new rules and guidelines must be launched, top-level managers or executives are tasked with adopting, executing, and imposing them (Fleming, 2020).
Finally, an impersonal environment was proposed by Weber, and he suggested that ties between workers are to be only work-related. The impersonal ecology exemplified by bureaucracies is made to encourage decision makings that are based precisely on logic and rational thinking. That is, it averts anything that could interfere with the company’s objectives, and they include favoritisms, nepotisms, and involvements from outsiders or political interferences. Conclusively, the last bureaucratic characteristic of Weber was meticulous record-keepings. According to Weber, leaders should take records on every position, occurrences, or concern involving the corporation. In his opinion, record keeping can enable them to refer to it later and handle any problem appropriately (Lumby, 2019).
Also, top-level executives should record every task of every accountability of every role in the corporation, so there are no arguments. If a worker calls in sick or comes to a job shift late, their supervisor should develop tabs to ensure that there are zero negative patterns. Additionally, employees should trail their hours, and take note of their everyday tasks and make headway. Top-level executives have the right to have knowledge on how their workers are using their time.
Essay 2: The U.S. has enough resources to eradicate poverty but would need to prioritize it. What changes would need to occur to make this a priority? How could these changes be accomplished? What barriers to the changes exist?
The United States of America has enough resources to avert poverty because it is one of the largest economies in the globe, yet, it only spends a small quantity of its finances on reducing ‘poverty.’ The United States is of the major influential agenda developers, has vast military forces, and has the biggest economies. Thus, it is automatically tasked with the responsibilities of developing global projects to reduce worldwide poverty. Luckily, there are numerous changes the United States is carrying out to avert the problem, but they would do more if they wanted to. First, the United States can develop and pass more bills like the Electricity Africa Act and the Global Food Security laws that are vital for concluding poverty because these bills’ successes are wholly independent to the US government. For example, the Electricity Africa bill would be significant to the developing African countries if passed. It would assist in offering electricity to roughly 100 million individuals in African countries (Michael-Onuoha et al., 2020).
Essentially, this progress is vital for advancing better securities, safer health care systems, and good housing facilities for low-income families, and in the end, it is crucial to averting shortage and inequalities. Luckily, the U.S. government is making it its mission to ensure that this bill is ratified. For this reason, the Electricity law has seen vast success in the House of Representatives and was approved with tremendous cross-party support. Currently, it is being moved to the Senate to be read and referred to the Commission on Foreign Relations. Besides, the U.S government has a role in passing this type of bill to ensure that they work to end worldwide poverty (Hubacek et al., 2017).
Nonetheless, the U.S government can offer more funding to foreign aids to help avert poverty. Statistically, the U.S government is ranked 19th worldwide when it comes to the number of foreign aids, and this is just unacceptable. This is because America is a superpower country with powerful economies, yet its placed 11th of 22 common benefactors for quality of foreign aids. Only 1.6% of the federal budgets go towards global activities compared to 24% of societal securities or 19% on defense expenditures. Therefore, for the U.S. government to efficiently end worldwide poverties, they must elevate their foreign aids, precisely by elevating the budgets of the United States Agency on Inter-continental Development (USAID), which directs all intercontinental charitable efforts the State is associated with. These finances can help developing countries by fighting rampant diseases, offering emergency helps after disasters, and adopting agricultural activities to elevate food securities. Besides, the more foreign aids that issued on these projects, the more helpful they can be in preventing worldwide poverty (Hubacek et al., 2017).
Consciously, the U.S government can work with other governments and intercontinental corporations to eradicate poverty levels in developing countries. The U.S. does not have any domestic challenges to be concerned about, and as a result, cannot rationally put all its effort into fighting worldwide poverty. Instead, they can work with diverse international corporations such as USAID to help tackle issues like poor nutrition in African states and societal establishments in Nigeria. It is because U.S. collaboration with corporations like USAID enables the U.S to have a function in preventing global poverty. Thus, the government should support this type of collaborations to live up to their obligations to work towards averting poverty levels all over the globe.
However, the U.S government is faced with barriers as they try to eradicate poverty levels in developing countries. The first challenge is the depth of the remaining poverty because even if there has been a report in the decline of poverty rates, there remains approximately 950 million poor individuals in 2020, and there is an expected shoot of 800 000 million in the coming years. In the past, most of the global poverty has been rampant in three areas: East Asia, South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, there have been enormous reductions in poverty levels across Asia while Sub-Saharan Africa experienced a steady elevation, and currently home to major worldwide poor (Michael-Onuoha et al., 2020).
Therefore, for the U.S. government to successfully avert the remaining poverty, it can develop policies that focus on the poorest in the society. Furthermore, inconsistency in shared prosperity is another barrier that the U.S faces when it tries to eradicate global poverty. Supporting shared prosperities is considered to promote the revenue growths of the bottom 40% of the revenue dissemination of individual countries. Other than eradicating poverty, the search for the shared prosperities is made up of major institutional aims for the World Bank Group. The features of the B40 may vary tremendously across states because in some, all the B40 are intensely poor, while in other richer countries, the B40 comprises of moderately poor and those susceptible to fall back to poverty levels. For this reason, it may become challenging for the U.S to decide on which country needs foreign aid more than the other because of the unevenness in shared prosperities between different countries.
Essay 3: What are the primary advantages of the experimental method compared to non-experimental methods? Explain the difference between a survey and an interview, and define 1) a variable, 2) a dependent variable, and 3) an independent variable. Discuss the problem of “spuriousness” in thinking about relationships among variables and give an example.
Experimental research has become a vital part of human life. There is a general misconception over research that once the research is non-experimental, then it is non-scientific, making it more significant to comprehend what experimental and non-experimental research method entails. Experimental research is the most known type of research, which is commonly referred to as scientific research. On the other hand, non-experimental studies are used to classify research that is not experimental. Therefore, it precisely varies from experimental research. The primary advantage of experimental research is that it offers a higher level of control for researchers than the non-experimental research method. This is because when researchers carry out experimental research, they are able to manipulate the variables so that they can develop a setting that enables them to observe the case they want (Zhang et al., 2018).
In addition, experimental research allows researchers to use many variations, while non-experimental study offers researchers minor variations to utilize. It is because researchers acquire complete control when they carry out experimental research, and this enables them to manipulate variables, and use many or few variations according to their preference. Thereby, this develops an environment where they can test their hypotheses without altering their research designs’ validity. Likewise, experimental research can be used in diverse fields, while the non-experimental research method utilizes fewer fields. To enumerate, experimental research is being used in numerous areas, such as therapeutic and pharmacological firms, to evaluate the effects of multiple treatments and drugs. It is also applied in fields like chemistry, societal science, and electronics (Zhang et al., 2018).
In the battles of the qualitative statistics collection methodologies, both surveys and interviews both are vital. To start up, an interview method is a method that is used when a specific target population is involved. The reason for carrying out the interview is to explore replies of other individuals to collect more and deeper data. On the other hand, in studies, surveys are a list of targeted questions for acquiring precise information from a specific group of individuals, and they may be carried out by telephones, mails, through the internet, and in supermalls, and street corners. Usually, both surveys and interviews involve questions and answers, and despite them being similar in nature, surveys and interviews can at times yield very diverse outcomes. Therefore, one of the major decisions a researcher has to make before collecting their information is to decide on the methods to use, because the last thing that they need is to get halfway via interviewing 100 individuals, only to realize that survey was the method that should have been used in the first place (Zhang et al., 2017).
The following are a few differences to consider when considering the data collection method that is best for the research. In survey data collection methods, the questions are often too many, short, and precise, and free-texted, while in interview methods, the questions are normally fewer, too detailed, and usually open-ended. The data relevance has variables depending on the respondent’s comprehension of guidelines in survey methods while in interview methods, the data relevance can easily keep respondents on the topic. Moreover, in interview methods, it is easier for respondents to fill out questions as well as its easier to bulk-process online surveys for researchers (Zhang et al., 2017).
On the other hand, survey methods require the respondents to commit a lot of time while researchers need a lot of time and effort to research, transcribe, and evaluate interviews. Categorically, variables in data collection refer to an attribute of an object in a study, and thus choosing which variables to measure is vital for good experimental designs. For this reason, variables are either dependent or independent in nature. Dependent variables are reliant on other factors like tests scores because they may vary if one reads harder, while the independent variable stands alone and cannot be changed by other variables such as someone’s age. Conclusively, spuriousness is a connection between two variables that looks causal but not. Spurious ties will appear to show that one variable will directly alter the other, but it is not the manner. One such example of spuriousness includes the skirt length ideology and super bowl pointers (Kite, 2017).
References
Fleming, C. J. (2020). Prosocial rule breaking at the street level: The roles of leaders, peers, and bureaucracy. Public Management Review, 22(8), 1191-1216.
Hubacek, K., Baiocchi, G., Feng, K., & Patwardhan, A. (2017). Poverty eradication in a carbon constrained world. Nature communications, 8(1), 1-9.
Michael-Onuoha, H. C., Nkiko, C., & Omorodion, O. (2020). Poverty Eradication: The Role of Nigerian Libraries towards the Achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Library Philosophy and Practice, 1-13.
Kite, M. E. (2017). Linking identification of independent and dependent variables to the goals of science.Lumby, J. (2019). Distributed leadership and bureaucracy. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 47(1), 5-19.
Zhang, W., Haser, A., Hou, H. H., & Nagapudi, K. (2018). Evaluation of accuracy of amorphous solubility advantage calculation by comparison with experimental solubility measurement in buffer and biorelevant media. Molecular pharmaceutics, 15(4), 1714-1723.
Zhang, X., Kuchinke, L., Woud, M. L., Velten, J., & Margraf, J. (2017). Survey method matters: Online/offline questionnaires and face-to-face or telephone interviews differ. Computers in Human Behavior, 71, 172-180.
