Amazon Bureaucracy Essay

Amazon is a company that utilizes technology so that its buyers can purchase objects from home and have the objects shipped right to the buyer. In 1995, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in his garage (Hartmans, 2017). At first, Amazon only sold books, but Jeff Bezos wanted Amazon to be more than an online book store (Hartmans, 2017). After a while Amazon grew into what the world knows it as today. Although Amazon was started out of Bezos’ garage, it has grown so large that certain stores like Sam’s Club have had to close (Green, 2018). Amazon has grown so large that one can consider it to be a bureaucracy. Some major characteristics of a bureaucracy are specialization, where a worker performs a certain task, hierarchical authority structure, in which

By having people designated to a particular task, Amazon has formed a division of labor. Division of labor helps a bureaucracy since it allows for only certain individuals to have more training which helps save the company time and money. A division of labor also helps the company see where additional employees are needed and where there are too many. In job settings where there are multiply different jobs done in a conveyer belt setting, a division of labor allows the object to be quickly and efficiently processed and shipped. In order to keep up with the growing number of customers, Amazon needed to have a division of labor to keep the process from selection of items to shipping then

Because of its size, Amazon employers will not be able to meet every employee. Since not every employee will have a relationship with the employer, the employee can feel not very important. Additionally, the shopping experience is impersonal since the customer does not communicate with other individuals. Since Amazon is impersonal, Amazon can hire and fire people without feeling guilty. Certain tasks require minimal to know training which makes replacing employees easy. Replicability makes the jobs