Any input for Tony Jay’s theory of bureaucracy?

On a visit to Antony Jay who is honing a new theory of bureaucracy.

Once you have a large bureaucracy, say several hundred people who have little or no contact with customers patients, passengers, pupils, or parents or whatever, it becomes a staff welfare system.

All the impetus for the staff is to improve their welfare and reduce their worry. It becomes all about overseas trips, important lunches, important car parking spaces at the expense of customers, larger offices, more assistants, reduction of opportunities to be blamed, bonuses and special payments.

The main job of management has to be to counter this tendency. The motivation of management in the competitive world is that if they fail they lose their job and the company fails. But in government monopoly bureaucracy this spur is removed. The purpose for which the bureaucracy was founded ceases to become an objective. Instead, it beomes a constraint.

Sound familiar? Examples welcome.

Published by William Heath on 06/10/07 at 5:56pm

Comments

Mel Dubnick writes
Anthony Jay’s insights are always quite interesting and entertaining, and so one hates to challenge on the basis of something as dull as empirical observation—or at least an alternative world view. But it does seem that counter-anecdotals indicate that it is the managers who are engaged in establishing a welfare system for themselves, and that the organization is merely a vehicle for their own self-serving careerism. We see that in the corporate world all the time—and there it is manifest in the unwarranted levels of compensation squeezed out of companies by an executive corps who take credit for manipulating the hard work of others. In government agencies we have the budget-maximizing bureau chief who uses the human and financial resources to enrich their egos and lifestyle.

Bottom line is that the real problem seems to rest in Anthony Jay’s solution—management. A theory which seeks to further empower managers will actually do more harm than good—no matter how entertaining it might be....

Reply by on 10/07/07 at 3:45 pm
Philip Virgo writes
C Northcote Parkinson said it all before - including an essay “proving” thatany nation that consistently takes more than 25% of its citizen’s earning is doomed to decline and ulimately revolution or disolution.

Edward Gibbon said it even earlier. He was still at the Board of Trade when he started Volume 1 of the “Decline and Fall” of the Roman Empire: strangled by red tape and over-taxation to fund bread and circuses for a bloated capital, choked with bureaucrats and welfare dependents. Its richest provinces “defected” to the “barbarians” - much cheaper.

Gibbon, perhaps even more than Adam Smith, set the intellectual tone for the bonfire of regulation and taxes that fuelled the economic boom that enabled the Britsih ruling classes to escape the fate of their French counterparts at the end of the 18th Century.

Reply by on 10/07/07 at 3:52 pm
Ian Brown writes to chastise me for having inadvertently disabled ALL comments.
You really must find a better spam-solution than blocking all comments - you might as well switch IdealGov from a blog
to a broadcast-only website :(

Whoops. Thanks Ian. this has really been a problem. I thought I had it right but I dont see the effect on a non-logged-in user. Anyway it’s now set
comments yes
membership required no
emailrequired no
moderation ON
so that shd work. Sorry for inconvenience caused to all.

Reply by on 10/07/07 at 3:57 pm
James Buchanan won a Nobel prize in the 1960s for work in this area. Google for “public choice theory” — nice introduction at Wikipedia.

Reply by Ian Brown on 10/07/07 at 4:15 pm
Pat Dunleavy writes
I don’t know how to blog this without being solipsistic, but I’d point out the well-established bureau-shaping model that covers much of the same ground, but better.

That’s the power of blogs. One moment I hear a good idea over a glass of Cardinal Mendoza after dinner and the next we’re being put on the right track by a world expert (even if I did manage to have the comment settings all wrong).

Pat points to the Wikipedia entry on his bureau-shaping theory
Bureau-shaping is a rational choice model of bureaucracy and a response to budget-maximization model. It argues that rational officials will not want to maximize their budgets, but instead to shape their agency so as to maximize their personal utilities from their work. For instance, bureaucrats would prefer to work in small, elite agencies close to political power centres and doing interesting work, rather than to run large-budget agencies with many staff but also many risks and problems. For the same reasons, and to avoid risks, the bureau-shaping model also predicts that senior government bureaucrats will often favour either ‘agencification’ to other public sector bodies (as in the UK ‘Next Steps’ programme) or off-loading functions to contractors and privatization. In the health and social work fields officials will favour ‘deinstitutionalization’ and ‘care in the community’. (The model was developed by Patrick Dunleavy from the London School of Economics in Democracy, Bureaucracy and Public Choice (London: Pearson Education, 1991, reissued 2001).

Reply by on 10/07/07 at 4:29 pm
It may be that there is much more to bureau-shaping than that brief description affords, but the world it describes is not one I recognise. “Bureaucrat” is for all practical modern purposes a term of abuse rather than analysis, and if we were work on the assumption that all “bureaucrats” have common characteristics, we will get nowhere.

Clearly there is a sense in which any rational actor employed in any role or sector will want to maximise their personal utility from their work. I am not sure why public sector managers should be seen as being distinctive in that respect. But people do not all find utility from the same factors. In the public sector, there are some quite distinct personal motivations implicit in people’s behaviour:

- Being (or feeling) in some sense close to power is one. But it is one that the overwhelming majority of managers cannot in practice achieve: being close to power is a positional good. If that were really the dominant motivation for most, rational actors would give up and start small businesses instead

- Being a manager is another - large-budget agencies are by and large run by people who are highly motivated by the effective management of large-budget agencies. As in any role, there may be some exploitation of that role for more personal objectives, but it’s a long way from there to asserting that that is either universal or dominant

- Motivation by public value is also strong (if rarely the sole motivation). Lots of people are coy about talking about it, so it’s easy to overlook or to assume that it is just empty rhetoric. One interesting test is talking to people who have joined the public sector after successful private sector careers. Overwhelmingly, in my experience, the reason for taking the job is explained in some version of the public sector ethos.

None of that is to say that producer capture is not a problem. Of course it is. But we are not going to get closer to ideal government on the basis of one dimensional theories of narrow self-interest.

Reply by PS on 10/08/07 at 8:46 pm
Elegantly put by Jay, as usual, but this isn’t really any more than the theory of rent-seeking in public choice, sketched by Parkinson as Philip Virgo remarks, but given some proper rigour (or as close as economics gets to proper rigour) between forty and fifty years ago, as Ian Brown picks up.

He’s slightly missing the point when he says, “The purpose for which the bureaucracy was founded ceases to become an objective,” in government monopolies. The constraint on non-monopolies isn’t their objectives enforced from above, but competition for sustenance.

The problem is not that state bureaucracies are free of pressures. It is that the pressures on them are utterly different for those competing to provide services to consumers. For all the whiffling about ‘market disciplines’ in the public sector, the paying customer is the state; he is paying with someone else’s money, and there is no competition for it, just an endlessley elaborated negotiation between embedded players.

Reply by on 10/18/07 at 7:39 pm
I was doing a research on theory of bureaucracy and found this article interesting. I am a freelance writer (custom essay) and I would like to admit that there are not so many truly interesting and informative articles as this one. ri

Reply by on 04/03/08 at 2:17 pm

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