Understanding Bureaucratic Involution through Weber’s Bureaucracy: China’s Central Inspection Teams in Practice

Max Weber came to see his “rational bureaucracy” as also something of an “iron cage.” The reliance on regularized paperwork can result in a separation of the administrative procedure from actual substance, and the level-by-level transmission of documents can result in the resolution of problems on paper only. The complex specialized and standardized procedures of the formal, hierarchical bureaucracy are therefore often ineffective because they have lost touch with reality. In China, the problem of the “involution” of public power found by central inspection teams 中央巡视组 during the course of their inspections is in essence the “formalist” 形式主义 response of bureaucracy when supervised and reviewed. Weber believed that the iron cage of bureaucracy, or the irrationality of rationality, needs an outside “charismatic” authority to check and counterbalance it. The practice of the central inspection teams, however, shows how bureaucratic organizations only further intensify formalism to preserve themselves in the face of such outside authority. That is to say, if the charismatic authority does not break through the trap of bureaucratized patterns of thought and behavior, the iron cage will only be further strengthened and perpetuated.