Bureaucracy is a system of organisation where decisions are made by a body of non-elected officials. Historically, a bureaucracy was a government administration managed by departments staffed with non-elected officials. Today, bureaucracy is the administrative system governing any large institution, whether publicly owned or privately owned. The public administration in many jurisdictions is an example of bureaucracy, as is any centralized hierarchical structure of an institution, including corporations, societies, nonprofit organisations, and clubs.
Students competed in imperial examinations to receive a position in the bureaucracy of Imperial China.
The 18th century Department of Excise developed a sophisticated bureaucracy. Pictured, the Custom House in the City of London.
Public administration, or public policy and administration, is the academic discipline that studies how public policy is created and implemented. It is also a subfield of political science that studies policy processes and the structures, functions, and behavior of public institutions and their relationships with broader society. The study and application of public administration is founded on the principle that the proper functioning of an organization or institution relies on effective management.
Public administration is both an academic discipline and a field of practice; the latter is depicted in this picture of U.S. federal public servants at a meeting.
Administrators tend to work with both paper documents and computer files: "There has been a significant shift from paper to electronic records during the past two decades. Although government institutions continue to print and maintain paper documents as 'official records,' the vast majority of records are now created and stored in electronic format." Pictured here is Stephen C. Dunn, Deputy Comptroller for the US Navy.
Woodrow Wilson
Luther Gulick (1892–1993) was an expert on public administration.
