Intelligence as a bureaucratic organization: Dysfunctions of the weberian model

Abstract

Despite the disparity of the intelligence services' historical development during the 20th century, a comparative approach reveals that most of today's democratic political regimes' intelligence communities maintain apparent similarities in their structure and operation, a product of the Weberian-type bureaucratic organization model's institutionalization. This article seeks to understand the intelligence services' organizational aspects from bureaucratic rationality to explore the criticisms of this model and evaluate its relationship with dysfunctions in the specific field of intelligence services. The results show that these distortions affect both the functionality and the legitimacy of these organizations, revealing the need to seek structural changes beyond the current model.