Bureaucracy replaced feudalism by hiring for competence instead of family ties, creating standardized job roles that could scale. This merit-based system became the template for modern corporations, turning individual work into interchangeable units that generated massive wealth.
Originally, bureaucracies were highly regarded. They were seen as a higher, superior form of organizing because what they were going against is feudalism. In feudal societies in the Middle Ages, people got positions, got jobs based on family ties. The idea of bureaucracy is to say, if we want to run organizations efficiently, we need to create stable roles, stable job designs, and we need to find people to fulfill those roles Not because they're part of my family, but because they actually have competence for that particular role. And so the initial idea of bureaucracy is a great idea. The implementation of the modern bureaucracy is seen as one of the fundamental reasons why we started to have large corporations that were able to grow and create massive amounts of wealth. Because we productized the individual piece of contribution and we made it like a little square. This is what you're supposed to do. This is what you're supposed to behave and how you're supposed to contribute to the bigger system.
