Bureaucracy is the collective
organizational structure,
procedure,
protocols, and
set of
regulations in place to
manage activity, usually in large organizations
and government. As opposed to
adhocracy,
it is represented by standardized procedure (rule-following) that
guides the execution of most or all processes within the body;
formal division of powers; hierarchy; and relationships, intended
to anticipate needs and improve efficiency.
A bureaucracy traditionally does not create policy but, rather,
enacts it.
Law,
policy,
and
regulation normally originates from a
leadership, which creates the bureaucracy
to put them into practice. In reality, the interpretation and
execution of policy, etc. can lead to informal influence. A
bureaucracy is directly responsible to the leadership that creates
it, such as a
government
executive or
board of
directors. Conversely, the leadership is usually responsible to
an
electorate,
shareholders, membership or whoever is intended
to benefit. As a matter of practicality, the bureaucracy is where
the individual will interface with an organization such as a
government etc., rather than directly with its leadership.
Generally, larger organizations result in a greater distancing of
the individual from the leadership, which can be consequential or
intentional by design.
Definition
Bureaucracy is a concept in
sociology and
political science referring to the
way that the administrative execution and enforcement of legal
rules are socially organized. Four structural concepts are central
to any definition of bureaucracy:
- a well-defined division of administrative labour among persons
and offices,
- a personnel system with consistent patterns of recruitment and
stable linear careers,
- a hierarchy among offices, such that the authority and status
are differentially distributed among actors, and
- formal and informal networks that connect organizational actors
to one another through flows of information and patterns of
cooperation.
Examples of everyday bureaucracies include
governments,
armed
forces,
corporations,
non-governmental
organizations (NGOs),
intergovernmental
organizations (IGOs),
hospitals,
courts,
ministries,
social clubs,
sports
leagues,
professional
associations and
academic
institutions.
Origins
While the concept as such existed at least from the early forms of
nationhood in
ancient times, the
word "bureaucracy" itself stems from the word "bureau", used from
the early 18th century in
Western
Europe not just to refer to a
writing
desk, but to an office, i.e., a workplace, where officials
worked. The original
French meaning
of the word
bureau was the
baize used
to cover desks. The term bureaucracy came into use shortly before
the
French Revolution of 1789, and
from there rapidly spread to other countries. The
Greek suffix -
kratia or
kratos - means "power" or "rule".
Development
Perhaps the early example of a bureaucrat is the
scribe, who first arose as a professional on the
early cities of
Sumer. The
Sumerian script was so complicated that it
required specialists who had trained for their entire lives in the
discipline of writing to manipulate it. These scribes could wield
significant power, as they had a total monopoly on the keeping of
records and creation of inscriptions on monuments to kings.
In later, larger empires like
Achaemenid Persia, bureaucracies quickly
expanded as government expanded and increased its functions. In the
Persian Empire, the central
government was divided into administrative
provinces led by
satraps.
The satraps were appointed by the
Shah to
control the provinces. In addition, a
general and a royal
secretary were stationed in each province to
supervise troop recruitment and keep records, respectively. The
Achaemenid Great Kings also sent royal inspectors to tour the
empire and report on local conditions.
The most
modernesque of all ancient
bureaucracies, however, was the
Chinese bureaucracy. During the chaos of
the
Spring and Autumn
Period and the
Warring States
Period,
Confucius recognized the need
for a stable system of administrators to lend
good governance even when the leaders were
inept. Chinese bureaucracy, first implemented during the
Qin dynasty but under more
Confucian lines under the
Han, calls for the appointment of bureaucratic
positions based on
merit via a system of
examinations. Although the
power of the Chinese bureaucrats waxed and waned throughout China's
long
history, the imperial
examination system lasted as late as 1905, and modern China still
employs a formidable bureaucracy in its daily workings.
Modern bureaucracies arose as the government of states grew larger
during the modern period, and especially following the
Industrial Revolution. As the authors
David Osborne and Ted Gaebler point out
"It is hard to imagine today, but a hundred years ago
bureaucracy meant something positive. It connoted a rational,
efficient method of organization – something to take the place of
the arbitrary exercise of power by authoritarian regimes.
Bureaucracy brought the same logic to government work that the
assembly line brought to the factory. With the hierarchical
authority and functional a specialization, they made possible the
efficient undertaking of large complex tasks."
Tax collectors, perhaps the most reviled of
all bureaucrats, became increasingly necessary as states began to
take in more and more revenue, while the role of administrators
increased as the functions of government multiplied. Along with
this expansion, though, came the recognition of the
corruption and
nepotism often inherent within the managerial
system, leading to
civil service reform on a
large scale in many countries towards the end of the 19th
century.
Types of Bureaucratic Agencies
Examining different agencies from a management point of view, they
differ in two main ways: whether or not the activities of the
operators can be observed, and whether the results of those
activities can be observed. The first factor deals with outputs, or
what the agency does on a day to day basis. The second factor deals
with outcomes, or the overall results of agency work. The extreme
cases where outputs and outcomes are either simple or difficult to
observe yields four different kinds of agencies: production,
procedural, craft, and coping.
- Production organizations are those in which
both outputs and outcomes are observable. Examples include the
Social Security
Administration, United
States Postal Service, and IRS. In
production organizations, managers can observe the outputs of
officials, and can (for example in the IRS) measure the amount of
money collected in taxes, and estimate with accuracy how much more
tax money will be produced by increasing the level of auditing
activity.
- Procedural organizations are those where
outputs can be observed, but outcomes are unclear or not
observable. Examples include the Occupational
Safety and Health Administration, and the United States armed forces during
peace time. OSHA may observe the actions of health inspectors, but
may not be able to measure how these individual actions add up to
improved safety and health in the workplace. In the armed forces
during peacetime, all aspects of training and deployment can be
observed, but it cannot be measured how these activities deter
aggression, or prepare for a future (unknown) conflict.
- Craft organizations are those where outputs
are hard to observe, but outcomes are fairly easy to evaluate.
Examples include the armed services at war, who may operate under a
fog of war, but whose battle outcomes can
be easily measured. Another example is the United States
Department of Labor
and their "Wage and Hour Division". While
the outputs of individual inspectors in the field are difficult to
measure, overall outcomes of negotiated compliance agreements and
referrals to federal attorneys for legal action are easily
measurable.
- Coping organizations are those where neither
outputs nor outcomes are observable. Typical examples
include Police Departments, and
the United States Department of
State
. Some of the activities of diplomats and
policeman cannot be observed or measured (e.g. sensitive
conversations with foreign leaders, and interactions with citizens
on the street), and the outcomes are also difficult to judge (e.g.
changes in foreign perceptions of US interests, and the level of
order on a policeman's beat)
An agency's type substantially impacts its approach to its mission,
(i.e. the degree to which its members are devoted to accomplishing
the agency's stated mission) and to compliance with the law and
existing policy.
Views on the concept
In a letter of July 1, 1790, the German
Baron von Grimm
declared: "We are obsessed by the idea of regulation, and our
Masters of Requests refuse to understand that there is an infinity
of things in a great state with which a government should not
concern itself."
Jean Claude Marie Vincent
de Gournay sometimes used to say, "We have an illness in France
which bids fair to play havoc with us; this illness is called
bureaumania." Sometimes he used to refer to a fourth or
fifth form of government under the heading of "bureaucracy".
In another letter of July 15, 1765 Baron Grimm wrote also, "The
real spirit of the laws in France is that bureaucracy of which the
late Monsieur de Gournay used to complain so greatly; here the
offices, clerks, secretaries, inspectors and
intendants
are not appointed to benefit the public interest, indeed the public
interest appears to have been established so that offices might
exist."
This quote refers to a traditional controversy about bureaucracy,
namely the perversion of means and ends so that means become ends
in themselves, and the greater good is lost sight of; as a
corollary, the substitution of
sectional interests for the
general interest. The suggestion here is that, left
uncontrolled, the bureaucracy will become increasingly self-serving
and
corrupt, rather than
serving society.
Karl Marx
In
Karl Marx's and
Friedrich Engels's theory of
historical materialism, the
historical origin of bureaucracy is to be found in
four
sources: religion, the formation of the state, commerce, and
technology.
Thus, the earliest bureaucracies consisted of castes of
religious clergy, officials and scribes operating various
rituals, and armed functionaries specifically delegated to keep
order. In the historical transition from primitive egalitarian
communities to a
civil society divided
into
social classes and estates,
beginning from about 10,000 years ago, authority is increasingly
centralized in, and enforced by a state apparatus existing
separately from society. This state formulates, imposes and
enforces laws, and levies taxes, giving rise to an officialdom
enacting these functions. Thus, the state mediates in conflicts
among the people and keeps those conflicts within acceptable
bounds; it also organizes the defense of territory. Most
importantly, the right of ordinary people to carry and use weapons
of force becomes increasingly restricted; in civil society, forcing
other people to do things becomes increasingly the legal right of
the state authorities only.
But the growth of trade and commerce adds a new, distinctive
dimension to bureaucracy, insofar as it requires the keeping of
accounts and the processing/recording of transactions, as well as
the enforcement of legal rules governing trade. If resources are
increasingly distributed by
prices in
markets, this requires extensive and
complex systems of record-keeping, management
and calculation, conforming to legal standards. Eventually, this
means that the total amount of work involved in commercial
administration outgrows the total amount of work involved in
government administration. In modern capitalist society, private
sector bureaucracy is
larger than government bureaucracy,
if measured by the number of administrative workers in the
division of labor as a whole. Some
corporations nowadays have a turnover larger than the national
income of whole countries, with large administrations supervising
operations.
A fourth source of bureaucracy Marxists have commented on inheres
in the technologies of
mass
production, which require many standardized routines and
procedures to be performed. Even if mechanization replaces people
with machinery, people are still necessary to design, control,
supervise and operate the machinery. The technologies chosen may
not be the ones that are best for everybody, but which create
incomes for a particular class of people or maintain their
power. This type of bureaucracy is nowadays often called a
technocracy, which owes its power
to control over specialized technical knowledge or control over
critical information.
In Marx's theory, bureaucracy rarely creates new wealth by itself,
but rather controls, co-ordinates and governs the production,
distribution and consumption of wealth. The bureaucracy as a social
stratum derives its income from the appropriation of part of the
social
surplus product of human
labor. Wealth is appropriated by the bureaucracy by law through
fees, taxes, levies, tributes, licensing etc.
Bureaucracy is therefore always a
cost to society, but
this cost may be accepted insofar as it makes
social order possible, and maintains it by
enforcing the rule of law. Nevertheless there are constant
conflicts about this cost, because it has the big effect on the
distribution of incomes; all producers will try to get the maximum
return from what they produce, and minimize administrative costs.
Typically, in epochs of strong
economic
growth, bureaucracies proliferate; when economic growth
declines, a fight breaks out to cut back bureaucratic costs.
Whether or not a bureaucracy as a social stratum can become a
genuine
ruling class depends greatly on
the prevailing
property relations and the
mode of production of wealth. In
capitalist society, the state typically lacks an independent
economic base, finances many activities on credit, and is heavily
dependent on levying taxes as a source of income. Therefore, its
power is limited by the costs which private owners of the
productive assets will tolerate. If, however, the state owns the
means of production itself,
defended by military power, the state bureaucracy can become much
more powerful, and act as a ruling class or
power elite. Because in that case, it directly
controls the sources of new wealth, and manages or distributes the
social product. This is the subject of Marxist theories of
bureaucratic collectivism.
Marx himself however never theorized this possibility in detail,
and it has been the subject of much controversy among Marxists. The
core organizational issue in these disputes concerns the degree to
which the
administrative allocation of resources by
government authorities and the
market allocation of
resources can achieve the social goal of creating a more free, just
and prosperous society. Which decisions should be made by whom, at
what level, so that an optimal allocation of resources results?
This is just as much a moral-political issue as an economic
issue.
Central to the Marxian concept of
socialism is the idea of workers' self-management,
which assumes the internalization of a
morality and self-discipline among people that
would make bureaucratic supervision and control redundant, together
with a drastic reorganization of the division of labor in society.
Bureaucracies emerge to mediate
conflicts of interest on the basis of
laws, but if those conflicts of interest disappear (because
resources are allocated directly in a fair way), bureaucracies
would also be redundant.
Marx's critics are however skeptical of the feasibility of this
kind of socialism, given the continuing need for administration and
the rule of law, as well as the propensity of people to put their
own self-interest before the communal interest. That is, the
argument is that self-interest and the communal interest might
never coincide, or, at any rate, can always diverge
significantly.
Max Weber
Max Weber has probably been one of the
most influential users of the word in its
social science sense. He is well-known for
his study of bureaucratization of society; many aspects of modern
public administration go back
to him; a classic, hierarchically organized
civil service of the
continental type is — if perhaps mistakenly —
called
Weberian civil service several different years
between 1818 and 1860, prior to Weber's birth in 1864.
Weber described the
ideal type
bureaucracy in positive terms, considering it to be a more rational
and efficient form of organization than the alternatives that
preceded it, which he characterized as
charismatic domination and
traditional
domination. According to his terminology, bureaucracy is
part of
legal domination. However,
he also emphasized that bureaucracy becomes inefficient when a
decision must be adopted to an individual case.
According to Weber, the attributes of modern bureaucracy include
its impersonality, concentration of the means of administration, a
leveling effect on social and economic differences and
implementation of a system of authority that is practically
indestructible.
Weber's analysis of bureaucracy concerns:
A bureaucratic organization is governed by the following seven
principles:
- official business is conducted on a continuous basis
- official business is conducted with strict accordance to the
following rules:
- the duty of each official to do certain types of work is
delimited in terms of impersonal criteria
- the official is given the authority necessary to carry out his
assigned functions
- the means of coercion at his disposal are strictly limited and
conditions of their use strictly defined
- every official's responsibilities and authority are part of a
vertical hierarchy of authority, with respective rights of
supervision and appeal
- officials do not own the resources necessary for the
performance of their assigned functions but are accountable for
their use of these resources
- official and private business and income are strictly
separated
- offices cannot be appropriated by their incumbents (inherited,
sold, etc.)
- official business is conducted on the basis of written
documents
A bureaucratic official:
- is personally free and appointed to his position on the basis
of conduct
- exercises the authority delegated to him in accordance with
impersonal rules, and his or her loyalty is enlisted on behalf of
the faithful execution of his official duties
- appointment and job placement are dependent upon his or her
technical qualifications
- administrative work is a full-time occupation
- work is rewarded by a regular salary and prospects of
advancement in a lifetime career
An official must exercise his or her judgment and his or her
skills, but his or her duty is to place these at the service of a
higher authority; ultimately he/she is responsible only for the
impartial execution of assigned tasks and must sacrifice his or her
personal judgment if it runs counter to his or her official
duties.
Weber's work has been continued by many, like
Robert Michels with his
Iron Law of Oligarchy.
- Criticism
As Max Weber himself noted, real bureaucracy will be less optimal
and effective than his ideal type model. Each of Weber's seven
principles can degenerate:
- Competences can be unclear and used contrary to the spirit of
the law; sometimes a decision itself may be considered more
important than its effect;
- Nepotism, corruption, political
infighting and other degenerations can counter the rule of
impersonality and can create a recruitment and promotion system not
based on meritocracy but rather on oligarchy;
Even a non-degenerated bureaucracy can be affected by common
problems:
- Overspecialization, making individual officials not aware of
larger consequences of their actions
- Rigidity and inertia of procedures, making decision-making slow
or even impossible when facing some unusual case, and similarly
delaying change, evolution and adaptation of old procedures to new
circumstances;
- A phenomenon of group thinking - zealotry, loyalty and
lack of critical thinking
regarding the organisation which is perfect and always
correct by definition, making the organisation unable to
change and realise its own mistakes and limitations;
- Disregard for dissenting opinions, even when such views suit
the available data better than the opinion of the majority;
- A phenomenon of Catch-22 (named after a famous book by Joseph
Heller) - as bureaucracy creates more and more rules and
procedures, their complexity rises and coordination diminishes,
facilitating creation of contradictory
and recursive rules, as described by the
saying "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the
expanding bureaucracy".
- Not allowing people to use common sense, as everything must be
as is written by the law.
In the most common examples bureaucracy can lead to the treatment
of individual human beings as impersonal objects. This process has
been criticised by many philosophers and writers (
Aldous Huxley,
George
Orwell,
Hannah Arendt) and
satirized in the comic strip
Dilbert,TV show
The
Office,
Franz Kafka's novels
The Trial and
The Castle ,
Douglas Adams' story
The Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy, and the films
Brazil and
Office Space.
Michel Crozier
Michel Crozier wrote The Bureaucratic
Phenomenon (1964) as a re-examination of Weber's (1922) concept of
the efficient ideal bureaucracy in the light of the way that
bureaucratic organizations had actually developed. Whereas for
Weber, bureaucracy was the ultimate expression of a trend toward
the efficient, rational organization, Crozier examined bureaucracy
as a form of organization that evokes:
"... the slowness, the ponderousness, the routine, the
complication of procedures and the maladapted responses of the
bureaucratic organization to the needs which they should satisfy"
(Crozier, 1964, p 3)
He examined a number of culturally specific examples of
bureaucratic organizations in an attempt to understand why
bureaucracies so often became dysfunctional.
After reviewing the different ways in which the term is used,
Crozier describes the sense in which he uses the term bureaucracy
thus:
"A bureaucratic organization is an organization that can not
correct its behaviour by learning from its errors" (Crozier, 1964,
p 187)
Adding:
"... not only a system that does not correct its behaviour in
view of its errors; it is also too rigid to adjust, without crises,
to the transformations that the accelerated evolution of the
industrial society makes more and more imperative" (Crozier, 1964,
p 198)
In essence, Crozier presents an argument against the Tayloristic
notion of 'the one best way' to organize an activity and Weber's
view of bureaucracy as the ultimate expression of rationality and
efficiency. He notes that in 1964 'advanced organizations' had
already:
"... been obliged to discard completely the notion of the one
best way [and] are beginning to understand that the illusion of
perfect rationality has to long persisted, weakening the
possibilities of action by insisting on rigorous logic and
immediate coherence" (Crozier, 1964, p 159)
From his analysis of his case studies, he develops a theory of
bureaucratic dysfunction based on his observations. Although he
later extends his ideas to cover other settings, the two main cases
on which he bases his theory are both located in France: "The
Clerical Agency" and "The Industrial Monopoly". Crozier chose these
examples not only because he was French, but also because he claims
that socially and culturally France has developed in such a way
that it created organizations that closely resembled the Weberian
notion of an ideal bureaucracy.
His theory is based on the observation that in situations where
almost every outcome has been decided in advance according to a set
of impersonal and predefined rules and regulations, the only way in
which people are able to gain some control over their lives is to
exploit 'zones of uncertainty' where the outcomes are not already
known.
"[an] unintended consequence of rationalisation [is] the
predictability of ones behaviour is the sure test of ones own
inferiority" (Crozier, 1964, p158)
For Crozier, organizations are not autonomous entities but social
constructs that are:
"... man made and socially created [and] the indirect result of
the power struggles within the organization" (Crozier, 1964, p
162)
Attacking both the rationalists and the human relations school for
ignoring the role that such power struggles play in the shaping of
an organization he argues that organizational relations are in fact
a series of strategic games where the protagonists attempt either
to exploit any areas of discretion for their own ends, or to
prevent others from gaining an advantage:
"Each group fights to preserve and enlarge the area upon which
it has some discretion, attempts to limit its dependence upon other
groups and accept such dependence only insofar as it is a safeguard
... [preferring] retreatisim if there is no other choice
but submission" (Crozier, 1964, p 156)
The result of this is that goals are subverted and the organization
becomes locked into a series of inward looking power struggles.
Thus, paradoxically, the result of attempting to design an
efficient organization that runs on rational and impersonal lines
is to create a situation where the opposite to is true.
- Theory of bureaucratic dysfunction
Crozier argues that:
"... the bureaucratic system of organization is primarily
characterized by the existence of a series of relatively stable
vicious circles that stem from centralisation and impersonality"
(Crozier, 1964, p 193)
He outlines four such 'vicious circles' that he observed in the
organizations he studied.
- The development of impersonal rules
In an attempt to be rational and egalitarian, bureaucracies attempt
to come up with a set of abstract impersonal rules to cover all
possible events. Crozier gives the example of the concours
(competitive examinations) which mean that, one the exams are
passed, promotion become simply a matter of seniority and avoiding
damaging conflicts. The result, he argues, is that hierarchical
relationships decline in importance or disappear completely which
means that higher level in the bureaucracy have effectively lost
the power to govern the lower levels.
- The centralization of decisions
If one wishes to maintain the impersonal nature of decision making,
it is necessary to ensure that decision are made at a level where
those who make them are protected from the influence of those who
are affected by them. The effect of this is that problems are
resolved by people who have no direct knowledge of the problems
they are called upon to solve, and so, priority is given to the
resolution of internal political problems instead. In this case,
the power to influence events over which one has direct experience
is lost and it is passed to some impartial central body.
- The isolation of strata and group pressure within strata
The suppression of the possibility of exercising discretion among
superiors and the removal of opportunities for bargaining from
subordinates results in an organization that consists of a series
of isolated strata. The notional equality within the strata becomes
the only defence for the individual against demands form other
parts of the organization and allows groups some degree of control
over their own domain. The result is very strong per group pressure
to conform to the norms of the strata regardless of individual
beliefs or the wider goals of the organization.
- The development of parallel power relationships
It is impossible to account for every eventuality, even by the
constant addition of impersonal rules and the progressive
centralisation of decision making; consequently, individuals or
groups that control the remaining zones of uncertainty, wield a
considerable amount of power. This can lead to the creation of
parallel power structures that give certain groups or individuals
in certain situations, disproportionate power in an otherwise
regulated and egalitarian organization. Once again, this can lead
to decisions being made based on factors separate from the overall
goals of the organization.
American Usage
Woodrow Wilson, writing as an
academic, professed:
...[A]dministration in the United States must be at all
points sensitive to public opinion. A body of thoroughly trained
officials serving during good behavior we must have in any case:
that is a plain business necessity. But the apprehension that such
a body will be anything un-American clears away the moment it is
asked. What is to constitute good behavior? For that question
obviously carries its own answer on its head. Steady, hearty
allegiance to the policy of the government they serve will
constitute good behavior. That policy will have no taint of
officialism about it. It will not be the creation of permanent
officials, but of statesmen whose responsibility to public opinion
will be direct and inevitable. Bureaucracy can exist only where the
whole service of the state is removed from the common political
life of the people, its chiefs as well as its rank and file. Its
motives, its objects, its policy, its standards, must be
bureaucratic.
Popular dictionary definitions reflect a popular dislike for
bureaucracy.
The American Heritage Dictionary', after two
traditional definitions of the word, the third and last definition
of bureaucracy reads in part: "numerous offices and adherence to
inflexible rules of operation;... any unwieldy administration."
According to
Webster's New world Dictionary of the American
Language, one of the definitions reads in part "bureaucracy is
governmental officialism or inflexible routine."
Roget's
Thesaurus gives among the synonyms for
bureaucracy:
"officialism", "officiousness", and "
red
tape".
American
science fiction writer
Jerry Pournelle has proposed a
theory he refers to as
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy",
which states:
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit
of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated
to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less
and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated
entirely."
This robust tendency is purported to operate to the effect that:
"...in any bureaucratic organization there will be two
kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the
organization, and those who work for the organization
itself.
Examples in education would be teachers who work and
sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to
protect any teacher including the most incompetent.
The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type
of person will always gain control of the organization, and will
always write the rules under which the organization
functions."
Austrian School Analysis
The analysis of bureaucracy by the
Austrian school reflects its characteristic
focus on economics, and emphasizes the distinction between
bureaucratic management and
profit management.
Current academic debates
Modern academic research has debated the extent to which elected
officials can control their bureaucratic agents. Because
bureaucrats have more information than elected officials about what
they are doing and what they should be doing, bureaucrats might
have the ability to implement policies or regulations that go
against the public interest. In the American context, these
concerns led to the "Congressional abdication" hypotheses—the claim
that Congress had abdicated its authority over
public policy to appointed bureaucrats.
Theodore Lowi initiated this debate by concluding in a 1979 book
that the U.S. Congress does not exercise effective oversight of
bureaucratic agencies. Instead, policies are made by "
iron triangles", consisting of
interest groups, appointed bureaucrats, and
Congressional
subcommittees (who, according to Lowi, were likely to have more
extreme views than the Congress as a whole). It is thought that
since 1979 interest groups have taken a large role and now do not
only effect bureaucracy, but also the money in congress. The idea
of "iron triangles" has since evolved to "iron hexagons" and then
to a "hollow sphere."
The relationships between the Legislatures, the Interest Groups,
Bureaucrats, and the general public all have an effect on each
other. Without one of these pieces the entire structure would
completely change. This relationship is considered "mu", or such
that not one single piece can describe or control the entire
process. The public votes in the legislatures and the interest
groups provide information, but the legislature and bureaucrats
also have an effect on the interest groups and the public. The
entire system is codependent on each other.
William Niskanen's earlier (1971)
'budget-maximizing' model
complemented Lowi's claims; where Lowi claimed that Congress (and
legislatures more generally) failed to exercise oversight, Niskanen
argued that rational bureaucrats will always and everywhere seek to
increase their budgets, thereby contributing strongly to state
growth. Niskanen went on to serve on the
U.S. Council of Economic Advisors
under President Reagan, and his model provided a strong
underpinning for the worldwide move towards cutbacks of public
spending and the introduction of privatization in the 1980s and
'90s.
Two branches of theorizing have arisen in response to these claims.
The first focuses on bureaucratic motivations; Niskanen's
universalist approach was critiqued by a range of pluralist authors
who argued that officials' motivations are more public
interest-orientated than Niskanen allowed. The
bureau-shaping model (put forward by
Patrick Dunleavy) also argues against
Niskanen that rational bureaucrats should only maximize the part of
their budget that they spend on their own agency's operations or
give to contractors or powerful interest groups (that are able to
organize a flowback of benefits to senior officials). For instance,
rational officials will get no benefit from paying out larger
welfare checks to millions of poor people, since the bureaucrats'
own utilities are not improved. Consequently we should expect
bureaucracies to significantly maximize budgets in areas like
police forces and defense, but not in areas like
welfare state spending.
A second branch of responses has focused more on Lowi's claims,
asking whether legislatures (and usually the American Congress in
particular) can control bureaucrats. This empirical research is
motivated by a
normative concern:
If we wish to believe that we live in a
democracy, then it must be true that appointed
bureaucrats cannot act contrary to elected officials' interests.
(This claim is itself debatable; if we fully trusted elected
officials, we would not spend so much time implementing
constitutional checks and balances.)
Within this second branch, scholars have published numerous studies
debating the circumstances under which elected officials can
control bureaucratic outputs. Most of these studies examine the
American case, though their findings have been generalized
elsewhere as well. These studies argue that legislatures have a
variety of oversight means at their disposal, and they use many of
them regularly. These oversight mechanisms have been classified
into two types: "Police patrols" (actively auditing agencies and
looking for misbehavior) and "fire alarms" (imposing open
administrative procedures on bureaucrats to make it easier for
adversely affected groups to detect bureaucratic malfeasance and
bring it to the legislature's attention).
A third concept of self-interested bureaucracy and its effect on
the production of
public goods has been
forwarded by
Faizul Latif
Chowdhury.
In contrast to Niskanen and Dunleavy, who
primarily focused on the self-interested behaviour of only the
top-level bureaucrats involved in policy making, Chowdhury in his
thesis submitted to the London School of Economics
in 1997 drew attention to the impact of the low
level civil servants whose rent-seeking
behaviour pushes up the cost of production of public goods.
Particularly, it was shown with reference to the tax officials how
rent-seeking by them causes loss in government revenue. Chowdhury’s
model of
rent-seeking
bureaucracy captures the case of administrative corruption
whereby public money is directly expropriated by public servants in
general.
See also
References
- Osborne, David and Gaebler, Ted. Reinventing Government : How
the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector.
Plume. February, 1993. ISBN 0452269423
- Wilson, James Q. Bureaucracy. Basic Books, 1989. ISBN
0465007856
- Baron de Grimm and Diderot, Correspondence littéraire,
philosophique et critique, 1753-69, 1813 edition, Vol. 4, p.
146 & 508 - cited by Martin Albrow, Bureaucracy.
London: Pall Mall Press, 1970, p. 16
- Friedrich Engels; The origin of the family, private
property and the state. [1]
- Crozier, M. (1964). The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (M. Crozier,
Trans.). London: Tavistock Publications.
- Wilson, Woodrow. The Study of Administration.
Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Jun., 1887), pp.
197-222
- Lowi. 1979. The end of liberalism. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company.
- Scholz and Wood. 1988. Controlling the IRS: Principals,
principles, and public administration. American Journal of
Political Science 42 (January): 141-162.
- Huber and Shipan. 2002. Deliberate discretion: The
institutional foundations of bureaucratic autonomy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
- Ramseyer and Rosenbluth. 1993. Japan's political marketplace.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
- McCubbins and Schwartz. 1984. Congressional oversight
overlooked: Police patrols versus fire alarms. American Journal
of Political Science 28: 16-79.
Further reading
- Albrow, Martin. Bureaucracy. London: Macmillan, 1970.
- On Karl Marx: Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution,
Volume 1: State and Bureaucracy. New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1979.
- Marx comments on the state bureaucracy in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
and Engels discusses the origins of the state in Origins of the Family.
- Ernest Mandel, Power and Money: A Marxist Theory of
Bureaucracy. London: Verso, 1992.
- On Weber:
- Neil Garston (ed.), Bureaucracy: Three Paradigms.
Boston: Kluwer, 1993.
- Chowdhury, Faizul Latif (2006), Corrupt Bureaucracy and
Privatization of Tax Enforcement. Dhaka: Pathak Samabesh, ISBN
984-8120-62-9.
- Weber, Max. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization.
Translated by A.M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons. London: Collier
Macmillan Publishers, 1947.
External links