Jesh Foundation

When most people hear the phrase “organizational politics,” they react very negatively. They see politics in the workplace as forming clicks and another way to keep those who go against the status quo labeled as an outsider. People also think that it’s a toxic dynamic that allows manipulative behaviors for people to get what they want by stepping on their co-workers’ backs. But not every instance of workplace politicking is a selfish maneuver to win.

Introduction

Political system is one of the subsystem of society, and play sufficient role in our life.

The term political system refers to a recognized set of procedures for implementing and obtaining the goals of a group.

Each society must have a political system in order to maintain recognized procedures for allocating valued resources. In political scientist Harold Lasswell’s (1936) terms, politics is who gets what, when, and how. Thus, like religion and the family, a political system is a cultural universal; it is a social institution found in every society.

We will focus on government and politics within the United States as well as other industrialized nations and preindustrial societies. In their study of politics and political systems, sociologists are concerned with social interactions among individuals and groups and their impact on the larger political order. For example, in studying the controversy over the nomination of Judge Robert Bork, sociologists might wish to focus on how a change in the group structure of American society—the increasing importance of the black vote for southern Democratic candidates—affected the decision making of Howell Heflin and other senators (and, ultimately, the outcome of the Bork confirmation battle). From a sociological perspective, therefore, a fundamental question is: how do a nation’s social conditions affect its day-to-day political and governmental life?

Bureaucracy, Organisation and Political Change

A Critical Analysis of Approaches to the Study of Organisation

Zohar Ben-Asher

It is of rather common agreement that organisation, at least originally, was formed in order to pursue the common interests of specific groups.[1] It is far from being agreed, however, what roles are played by various sorts of internal organisational structures, especially when somehow related to political change.

Weber, for example, perceived politics in terms of dispositions over weapons and over means of administration.[2] This implies the existence of overt or covert political classification. The key to such a classification would be a certain formula by which organisational structure would be determined. It might resemble the supposed Marxist classification of economic epochs and the “economic” classes that feature in this type of classification. A question thus might arise: Why would Weber have to follow Marx in essence but still differ in as much as he chose to change the keys for classification.

One, perhaps oversimplified, possible answer is that Weber simply “does not see anything attractive in socialism.”[3] This is what Gerth and Mills had suggested, maybe because it was them who found socialism so unattractive. But as it were, the difference between Marx and Weber goes beyond this level of argumentation. It indicates their profoundly different concepts of what is politics. Both of them perceived and understood politics as a process that reveals itself and is reflected through organisation. But it was not the same organisation for these two thinkers. The difference was mainly in the way they viewed the structure of this process.

Introduction

The United States is commonly classified as a representative democracy. What is that?

In a literal sense, democracy means government by the people. The word democracy originated in two Greek roots—demos, meaning “the populace” or “the common people”; and kratia, meaning “rule.” Of course, in large, populous nations, government by all the people is impractical at the national level. It would be impossible for the more than 246 million Americans to vote on every important issue that comes before Congress. Consequently, democracies are generally maintained through a mode of participation known as representative democracy, in which certain individuals are selected to speak for the people.

The United States is commonly classified as a representative democracy, since Americans elect members of Congress and state legislatures to handle the task of writing laws.

Unlike monarchies, oligarchies, and dictatorships, the democratic form of government implies an opposition which is tolerated or, indeed, encouraged to exist. In the United States, there are two major political parties—the Democrats and Republicans—as well as various minor parties. Sociologists use the term political party to refer to an organization whose purposes are to promote candidates for elected office, advance an ideology as reflected in positions on political issues, win elections, and exercise power.