What it is Bureaucracy is a way of organising work based on hierarchy and division of labour.
Hierarchy means that some people are officially in positions of power over others.
In an army, generals give commands to colonels, colonels give commands to majors, and so on down to privates. Similarly, the chief executive of a company is officially in a position of power over their deputies and so on down to the bottom level of workers. Division of labour means that different people do different parts of the work. For example, on a traditional assembly line in a car manufacturing plant, one worker might put the same bolts on car after car while others work on windows, fenders, painting and so on. Yet other workers specialise in car design, marketing, cleaning, accounting and so forth.