Every kind of culture can be characterized by its fundamental form of social organization. Folk culture is based upon kinship and mediaeval society depends upon feudalism as its method for organizing social relationship between its members. With the rise of cities and commerce a different kind of system became necessary. Bureaucracy is the term often applied to his form. This is not to say that bureaucracy did not exist before modern times but that the kind of social relationships required by bureaucracy have become more essential to the maintenance of society. The fairly obvious historical trend that the notion of increasing bureaucracy attempts to describe has also been characterized in highly different ways but always with the same them. The change is characterized by increasing importance of specialization and of rationality applied to the organization of social life by members of society.