Bureaucracy and Its Functional Deviations: From Max Weber to the Critique of Biropathology
Bureaucracy and Its Functional Deviations: From Max Weber to the Critique of Biropathology

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the theoretical foundations, paradigmatic developments, and critical reorientations that have shaped sociological inquiry from its classical emergence to its contemporary dispersions. Rejecting both teleological narratives of progress and reductionist categorizations, the text proposes a layered and reflexive reading of theory as a space of epistemic contestation. Through a systematic engagement with canonical authors such as Durkheim, Weber, and Mills, alongside interventions by Kuhn, Foucault, Bourdieu, and contemporary scholars of digital, intersectional, and posthumanist sociology, the article reconstructs the shifting modalities of explanation, from functionalist systematization to genealogical critique and assemblage-based analysis. Rather than treating theory as a reservoir of fixed models, it is approached as a field of conceptual labor, where meanings are constructed, interrogated, and reframed. In place of synthesis or closure, the study emphasizes the cartographic orientation of contemporary theorizing, wherein categories are unsettled, boundaries are porous, and knowledge emerges through translation, resonance, and rupture. The contribution invites renewed attention to the conditions under which sociological concepts are produced and to the tensions that animate their deployment in historically situated configurations.

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