Follow the rules

Bureaucracy

March 02, 2022

Follow the rules

Today, we associate bureaucracy with long lines and delays, hours spent on hold, and unresponsive government agencies. If you want to insult an organization, call it bureaucratic.

But bureaucracies exist for a reason. As human societies got bigger and more complex, managing them got harder. A small clan of people tied together by kinship can be governed by consensus or charisma. A nation state, by contrast, requires rules, and people to enforce them. Those people are bureaucrats.

Bureaucracies made the modern world, for good and ill. They built roads and fought wars, administered welfare states and enforced colonialism, put a man on the moon and many more in prison. And as much as we love to hate them, we still haven’t figured out how to do without them.

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By the digits

30%: Public sector employment as a share of paid employment globally

19%: Wage premium for public sector workers, compared to the private sector, globally

28: Rank levels in the US army

20%: Increase in turnover among senior executives in the US government at the start of a new presidency

28%: Share of the workweek spent on “bureaucratic chores,” according to a survey of Harvard Business Review readers

67%: Share of readers in that survey who said their organization was becoming more bureaucratic

8: Bosses the main character has in the 1999 film Office Space

Etymology

The word “bureaucrat” combines the French word for desk with the Greek word for political power.

“Red tape” was originally meant literally—it referred to the red ribbon used to bind documents in 16th-century Europe.

Person of interest

To the Max

A portrait of German political economist and social scientist Max Weber.

Max Weber is considered one of the founders of modern social science, and his writing on bureaucracy still defines its study.

Weber thought bureaucracy was on the rise in government and in business due to its “technical superiority over any other form of organization,” but he took a nuanced view of its effects. By shifting decisions away from personal bias and toward rules, bureaucracy was a social and economic leveler.

But it also concentrated power in the hands of whomever was in charge. It endowed bureaucrats with considerable power, too, which they were likely to protect by hiding their true intentions from the public. “The absolute monarch… is powerless in face of the superior knowledge of the bureaucratic expert,” Weber wrote in his essay on bureaucracy (pdf), from his book Economy and Society, published posthumously in Germany in 1921—a line that could have come from a present-day screed against the Deep State.

Listed

Here are the essential elements of bureaucracy, according to Weber:

🛑 Rules: A bureaucracy needs some jurisdiction in which it is allowed to operate, and rules about what it is and isn’t allowed to do.

🏤 Hierarchy: Clear lines of authority let complaints flow up and orders flow down.

📝 Paperwork: “The management of the modern office is based upon written documents (the ‘files’),” he writes. Hence the “bureau” (desk): bureaucracies write things down and keep records.

👩‍🔬 Expertise: Bureaucrats are trained specialists and they are professionals, in contrast with part-time honorary positions held alongside some other job.

⚖️ Mission: Government bureaucrats undertake public service out of a sense of duty rather than for personal profit.

🧮 Objectivity: Unlike forms of organization that rely on personal relationships, bureaucracies are impersonal on purpose.

Giphy/Space Force

Pop Quiz

Which of these is NOT a part of the current US federal bureaucracy?

Weights and Measures DivisionPlanetary Defense Coordination OfficeOffice of Cuba BroadcastingThe Southern Reach

Correct.

Incorrect.

If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email.

Charted

A scatter plot showing various countries' bureaucratic quality score vs. GDP per capita. Countries with a higher quality of bureaucracy tend to have higher GDP per capita.

In a 2021 paper, researchers created a “bureaucratic quality score” combining measures of how government employees were hired and how impartially services were administered. Using that measure, they found that countries with more effective bureaucracies have higher GDP. That’s likely in part because the better a country’s bureaucracies, the easier it is to collect taxes, build infrastructure, and provide public services—all of which are required for an economy to grow.

Origin story

Chinese bureaucracy

Prior to the Song dynasty (960–1279), political appointments in China relied on letters of recommendation. But under the Song, China became the first society with printed books which in turn spurred formal education. With education comes tests: the Song emperors expanded the country’s nascent examination system, and quickly doubled the number of public officials who gained their job via test scores.

This modest shift toward meritocracy marked an important moment in the history of bureaucracy. Whereas government appointments are traditionally given out based on political considerations, bureaucracy aspires to be a system based on expertise.

It took most of a millennium for the West to copy China’s innovation. In 1854, the UK government published the Northcote-Trevelyan report calling for competitive entry exams for the national civil service. In 1883, the US passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which also introduced exams and limited the purchase of government jobs.

Quotable

“The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could 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.”

—Political theorist Hannah Arendt in her 1970 book On Violence

Eric Helgas, styling by Alex Citrin-Safadi

Listen up!

🎧 It’s what’s for dinner

As covid-19 disrupted routines, millions of parents turned to comforting and kid-friendly meals, which sent fish stick sales soaring. But the pandemic’s favorite frozen rectangles are more than just an easy entree—they’re a “futuristic” 1950s creation with the potential to solve modern food problems.

Quartz deputy email editor Liz Webber took host Kira Bindrim on a (virtual) trip to the supermarket freezer aisle in this week’s episode of the Quartz Obsession podcast.

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The way we 📎 now

Since the 1970s, there have been various challenges to bureaucracy, mostly in the form of attacks on the size of government. But the alternatives all proved to have their own problems. Here are a few:

Markets: Great at distributing resources and introducing new products, but are really inefficient (pdf) and often fuel inequality
Startups: Nimble when they’re small, but face many of the same problems as large, bureaucratic firms once they get big
Agile: An emphasis on small teams, iteration, and continuous feedback is really difficult to scale
Democracy: The history of the labor movement shows the benefits of adding workers’ voices to decision-making, but it slows things down

YouTube

Watch this!

Caught in a bureaucratic nightmare

In the 1985 film Brazil, bureaucracy itself is the villain, as a paperwork error leads to the arrest of an innocent man and the downfall of the civil servant who tries to correct the mistake. This clip shows how efficient bureaucrats can be—as long as the boss is watching.

Giphy/France tv

Poll

How bureaucratic is your workplace?

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Not at all—we go with the flowA bit bureaucratic—that’s inevitableI’m drowning in red tape

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Today’s email was written by Walter Frick (diligent rule follower), edited by Liz Webber (took three tries to get a French residency card), and produced by Jordan Weinstock (never discouraged by a little red tape).