SECTION OF
ADMINISTRATIVE LAW & REGULATORY PRACTICE
Ombudsman Committee
Institutionalizing a Bureaucratic Monitoring Mechanism:
The First Thirty Years of Hawaii’s Ombudsman
By
Larry B. Hill
Professor of Political Science
The University of Oklahoma
Norman, Oklahoma 73019
hill@ou.edu
Prepared for Delivery at the 1998 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association
The Boston Marriott Hotel, Boston, MA,
September 3 –6, 1998. Copyright by the American
Political Science Association, 1998
[revised and expanded version, november 10, 1998.]
According to Max Weber, a principal virtue of his ideal type of bureaucracy is that it "is capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency" (Weber 1978: 1, 223). Thus, it is the type of human organization that is especially appropriate for a rational-legal society. Furthermore, an important component of his ideal type of bureaucracy is that universally applicable, personally neutral norms are employed in making the organization’s decisions. In a passage that has become famous, Weber stressed the necessity for bureaucracies to operate according to the norm of depersonalization:
The dominance of a spirit of formalistic impersonality: ‘Sine ira et studio’, without hatred or passion, and hence without affection or enthusiasm. The dominant norms are concepts of straightforward duty without regard to personal considerations. Everyone is subject to formal equality of treatment; that is, everyone in the same empirical situation (Weber 1978: 1, 225).
In constructing his ideal type of bureaucracy, Weber set a high performance standard for the real-world organizations that we label public bureaucracies.1
Of course, actual public bureaucracies sometimes do not live up to this standard. For example, sometimes bureaucracies are inefficient and personalized—they lose citizens’ paperwork, they do not act in a timely manner, they display bias or prejudice. Remedying these bureaucratic defects is the raison d’être for creating any bureaucratic monitoring mechanism2.
Americanizing the Ombudsman
The Ombudsman’s Bureaucratic Structure
Human Resources Management
Managing Investigations
The Complaint Process in a Nutshell
The Ombudsman's Annual Report
The Ombudsman’s Values
Conclusion
Notes
References
Updated: 2/25/99
ABA Section of Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice
740 15th Street, NW
Washington,
DC 20005-1009
E-Mail: adminlaw@abanet.org
