Thursday 29 June 2023
Conscientious
How easy is it to be a conscientious bureaucrat? Easy enough to be popular. Attractive for mediocrities who prefer to work sitting down, who gravitate towards rules, soft responsibility and a five day week with a relaxed attitude to sickies.
It is hardly surprising that we are drowning in bureaucracy. Too many people are able do it, want to do it and are prepared to vote for more of it. Most of my working life was spent in bureaucracies which over the years became more bureaucratic. Bureaucracies definitely like being bureaucratic.
It’s an oversimplification, but a core problem seems to stem from people trying to be conscientious in two different ways, one of which is more popular and easier than the other.
It is possible to be a conscientious bureaucrat by a nitpicking adherence to existing rules, procedures and processes. It is also possible to be a progressive bureaucrat by proposing to widen the remit of those rules, procedures and processes. It may frustrate those outside the bureaucracy, but from the inside it is conscientious.
Alternatively, it is possible to be a conscientious bureaucrat by trying to improve or scrap existing rules, procedures or processes because they no longer serve their supposed purpose. These people don’t get anywhere. It’s the wrong career choice.
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2 comments:
I think it depends on what goal the individual thinks they are serving. It's certainly possible that some people think they are serving a wider aim than just perpetuating the bureaucracy in order to stay in a job and have an easy time at work. Nearly all groupings become bureaucratic at some point because it actually is a good way of organising things in a relatively frictionless way, and recording what you have done prevents one from continually re-inventing the wheel.
At university, I was interested in those theorists (like Michels, Pareto and Mosca) who looked at how socialist revolutionaries adopted bureaucratic methods and thereby ended up subverting their own socialism. It's probably one good outcome!
Sam - to my mind it seems like imitation as navigation towards predictable outcomes. A consequence of the least energy principle applied to brain function. Although bureaucracies can be efficient as seen by internal measures, almost everything they do could be even more efficient as seen by external measures.
Powerful bureaucracies nullify those external measures and that can seem like volition, but it could be much more impersonal, a consequence of what we and bureaucracies are. We sort of know that because we make bureaucracies stick to budgets, but we don't use the knowledge well in public debates and don't adequately debate the dangers and limitations of bureaucracies. Maybe because the bureaucrat is within all of us.
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