EN
The civil service and broader the public administration, should be more often the domain of managers, politicians apart from lawyers. Classically, the public management has adopted a hierarchical basis, the slim organizational structure with many levels and a small span of management – commonly called a bureaucratic. Currently, the term 'bureaucracy' is a synonym for lazy, inefficient, although it originally meant specialization, formalization, centralization, and the continuity of tasks. The purpose of this article is therefore to compare approaches to the administrative department – the bureaucratic and managerial one. There is also the attempt to identify the Polish position on the background of the European Union in this regard.