5 ideas
The skills and habits that made an official effective under past conditions become blind spots when conditions change, because the training itself makes the old response feel correct. Actions based on that training produce inappropriate outcomes in new situations, so competence and incompetence come from the same source.
Bureaucracy demands strict adherence to rules to make conduct reliable and predictable. The official is disciplined to value that adherence so intensely that conformity shifts from a means to a terminal value, and the purpose the rules were meant to serve drops out of view. The result is ritualism, in which following procedure matters more than achieving the organisation's actual aims.
Merton links the official's career incentives, such as graded promotion by seniority, pensions and tenure, to conformity with official regulations. He argues these incentives encourage conservatism, technicism and caution, so the career structure itself contributes to overconformity.
Officials who share a common fate develop in-group solidarity and emotional attachment to procedures. That attachment gives rules a moral, almost sacred quality beyond their technical justification. As a result, officials resist proposed changes as if they were violations of principle rather than evaluating them on efficiency grounds, and they defend their collective interests even against superiors or the public they serve.
Bureaucratic efficiency requires sorting people into abstract categories and treating each case impersonally. Clients, however, experience their own situation as unique and urgent, so they perceive the treatment as cold and arrogant. Because the official also speaks with the authority of the office, even ordinary procedural rigidity feels domineering, which is why 'bureaucrat' became an epithet.