Breaking down the question
The command examine at 10 marks calls for a focused exposition of the salient features of Weber's model of bureaucracy — its defining structural characteristics — delivered with economy. The word salient directs the candidate to select the essential features and present them clearly, not to write everything Weber ever said about administration.
Two points of precision earn early credit. First, Weber's bureaucracy is an ideal type — a deliberate mental construct that isolates the pure logic of the form, not a description of any real office. Second, bureaucracy is the administrative apparatus of rational-legal authority, the mode of domination that rests on rules rather than on tradition or charisma. Locating bureaucracy within Weber's theory of authority shows the examiner conceptual grasp rather than a mere list.
A brief evaluative close — noting bureaucracy's technical efficiency alongside Weber's own anxiety about the "iron cage" — converts a descriptive answer into an analytical one within the tight word budget.
How to approach it
Open by defining bureaucracy as an ideal type and as the characteristic administrative form of rational-legal authority. This frame, one or two sentences, gives the features that follow their logic.
Then set out the salient features in a clear sequence: a hierarchy of offices, functioning through written rules, staffed by appointed and salaried officials selected on qualification, exercising authority impersonally, with a clear division of labour, official jurisdiction, career tenure, and the separation of office from the person who holds it. The note on power, elites and political institutions and the profile of Max Weber provide the wider context of authority and rationalisation.
Close with a compact evaluation: technical superiority and efficiency on the one hand, the dangers of the iron cage, red tape, and oligarchy on the other. Keep it tight — at 10 marks, order and precision beat volume.
Model answer
Bureaucracy, for Max Weber, is the most rational and technically efficient form of administration known to modern society, and the characteristic apparatus of rational-legal authority — the type of domination in which obedience is owed not to a person or a custom but to an impersonal legal order. Weber described it as an ideal type: a pure, logically consistent construct that highlights the essential features of the form, against which real organisations can be measured. Its salient features are the following.
Hierarchy of offices. Bureaucracy is organised as a clearly ordered hierarchy in which each office is supervised by a higher one. Authority and responsibility are graded from top to bottom, so that lines of command and appeal are unambiguous.
Rules and written records. The conduct of office is governed by a consistent system of abstract rules, uniformly applied. Decisions, acts, and communications are recorded in writing and preserved in files, giving the organisation continuity, predictability, and calculability.
Official jurisdiction and division of labour. Each office has a fixed and official sphere of competence, with duties defined by rules. Tasks are specialised and distributed as a systematic division of labour, so that trained expertise attaches to each function.
Impersonality. Officials discharge their duties sine ira et studio — without hatred or passion, and hence without personal favour. Both officials and the public are treated according to the rules, not according to personal relationships, which secures equal and predictable treatment and excludes arbitrary caprice.
Appointment, qualification, and career. Officials are appointed, not elected, on the basis of technical qualifications, often certified by examination. They are salaried, work full-time, and pursue a career with regular promotion by seniority or merit and security of tenure. Office-holding is a vocation.
Separation of office from incumbent. The official does not own the means of administration; office and private life, official resources and personal property, are kept strictly separate. The office belongs to the organisation, not to the person who occupies it.
Assessment. Weber held that bureaucracy's precision, speed, calculability, and impartiality made it technically superior to every other form of organisation — indispensable to the modern state and economy. Yet he was deeply ambivalent about its human consequences. Its relentless rationalisation threatened to trap individuals in an "iron cage" of rules and routine, and its critics have since documented its pathologies — red tape, rigidity, ritualism, and the tendency, noted by Michels as the "iron law of oligarchy", for bureaucratic organisations to concentrate power in a few hands. Bureaucracy is thus at once the triumph and the burden of modern rationality.
Examiner's perspective
At 10 marks the examiner rewards the candidate who frames bureaucracy correctly before listing its features — as an ideal type and as the vehicle of rational-legal authority. Scripts that plunge straight into features without this frame read as memorised lists and forgo easy conceptual marks.
The features themselves must be accurate and distinct: hierarchy, written rules, impersonality, qualified salaried officials, fixed jurisdiction, and the separation of office from person. Impersonality and the separation of office from the individual are the features candidates most often omit, yet they are central to Weber's argument, so including them signals thoroughness.
The best short answers spend their final sentences on evaluation — the tension between technical efficiency and the iron cage, with a nod to Michels's oligarchy — showing the examiner that the candidate understands Weber's own ambivalence rather than presenting bureaucracy as an unqualified good.