Bureaucracy as an organizational disease

Pathocracy

Nature

Large organizational units tend to develop a multiplicity of tortuous procedures, narrow outlooks, and a high-handed manner in dealing with individuals and external bodies. This organizational malaise may include failure to allocate responsibilities clearly, application of rigid rules and routines with little consideration of cases, elevation of status over function, blundering officials, diffusion of responsibility, overstaffing, administrative delays, conflicting directives, duplication of effort, departmental empire building, and concentration of real power in the hands of relatively few people.

Background

The modern theory of bureaucracy derives largely from the German sociologist Max Weber, who saw it as the formal codification of the idea of rational organization. Yet from the start popular writers have seen bureaucracy as an irrational force, dominating the lives of people, while political theorists have seen it as an independent force tending to swallow all of society in its maw.

Contrary to the prevailing belief that universal rules govern bureaucracies, in day to day operations, rule can and must be selectively applied which in turn invites corruption and misuse within the bureaucracy. The application of rules requires a high degree of discretion because rules can only specify what should be done when an action falls clearly within unambiguously specifiable categories, about which there can be no disagreement or difference in interpretation. Such categories are impossible. Ambiguity and vagueness can be found in any rule; moreover, conflicting rules or implications of rules can generally found which can be used to justify any decision an office holder wishes to make. Organizations develop their own common practices independent of rules and guidelines which take on the status of rules. Ultimately, the office holder has license to apply rules derived from a nearly bottomless pit of choices. Individual self-interest then depends on the user's ability to ingratiate himself to office holders at all levels in order to ensure that those rule most favourable are applied. The goals of the bureaucracy are frequently displaced by objectives in conflict with the purpose of the organization.

Incidence

Contrary to current belief, bureaucracy as a disease is not confined to governmental agencies, but can be found in all kinds of organizational units, particularly large ones.

Claim

Successful bureaucrats are driven by two guiding principles: multiply subordinates, not rivals; make work for each other. Every official who feels overworked strives to ensure the appointment of subordinates, who, in their turn, continue the process. Left to their process of make-work, bureaucracies ultimately self-destruct.

In any bureaucracy, paperwork increases as you spend more and more time reporting on the less and less you are doing.

In any bureaucracy, stability is achieved when you spend all of your time reporting on the nothing you are doing.

Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies.

"In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant." (Hannah Arendt, On Violence).

Counter-claim

When people can no longer communicate on a face-to-face basis, they need formal regulations at every level of the organization. The tendency to equate all forms of institutions as bureaucratic creates meaningless conceptual frameworks from which to deal with the excesses of institutional organizations.