THE BUREAUCRATIC SYNDROME
Thought for many is hard work, which is why it often commands high pay. It also, alas, is compulsively delegated.
No one should be in doubt: one of the inescapable features of life in the late twentieth century is the great, complicated and multilayered organization. With all else, it is the source of much present-day innovation. The latter is no longer the distinctive product of one acutely inspired brain, although this source of invention is still celebrated; normally it is the result of the cooperative effort of diversely competent specialists, each making his or her uniquely qualified contribution to the common goal. As economic and public operations become more complex, it is necessary to unite varying skills, different experience, different education, resulting specialization and different degrees of intelligence, or, at a minimum, its confident outward expression.
Out of this need for both number and diversity of talents comes the need for supervision, coordination and command. This, in turn, and depending on the size and complexity of the job at hand, can involve numerous levels of authority, or what is so described. Further, since the requisite knowledge and intelligence derive in large measure from those whose contributions are brought together and coordinated, so in no slight measure does the power in the organization. The modern corporation or public agency has an internal intelligence and authority of its own; these are to some extent independent of, or superior to, those of the persons who are seen, and who see themselves, as in command. The latter point should not go unremarked. The power attributed to the cabinet secretary recently arrived in office with no previous experience in his or her now-assigned task or to the corporate chief executive officer now rewarded for an orderly and disciplined performance in the ranks is subject to an exaggeration to which those so celebrated happily and even diligently contribute.
Not surprisingly, the culture of the great organization is enormously influenced by the pursuit of contentment. This is evident in two important ways, both proceeding from the discomforts associated with original or dissenting thought. Also involved is a deeply ingrained, much invoked distinction between private organization and public organization—between the great private bureaucracy and its large public counterpart. In the culture of contentment the former is perceived as efficient and dynamic, while the latter is thought to be mentally moribund, seriously incompetent and, on frequent occasion, offensively arrogant.
In any large organization there must, first of all, be a well-developed sense of common purpose. This is informally, and sometimes formally, articulated in the large modern firm as company policy; in the public organization it is called official or departmental policy. “We are committed this year to big, if somewhat less fuel-efficient cars; that is what the American customer wants.” “The Communist threat may no longer exist, but our policy still calls for a strong defense.”
Individual contentment, all are aware, is powerfully served by acceptance of this formally stated or commonly assumed purpose. Resistance or dissent is adverse to the cooperative effort essential to organizational success. Accordingly, the man or woman who, however justly, questions the established policy is challenging one of the basic requirements of organized achievement. That requirement is to accept and serve the common goal—to be, in common terminology, a good team player. Needless to say, that is also the course that contributes to personal comfort. Few things are so agreeable, Tolstoy observed, as to surrender one’s self to the regiment. Few things are so discomfiting, even painful, as the cerebration and resulting speech or action that impair one’s social and working relationships, and nothing can be so damaging to prospects for pay and promotion. “The fellow may be bright enough, but he is not cooperative.”
However, that is by no means all. It is part of the human vanity that there is intrinsic reward in mental effort. For some, doubtless, this is true; for most, mental effort is something that it is exceptionally pleasant to avoid. From this comes the nature of all great organization: those serving it have a powerful commitment to established belief and thus to established action. This regularly rewards those who surrender independent thought to organizational policy. Their surrender, in turn, serves personal acceptance and social harmony and is both central to the culture of contentment and a powerful conditioning therein. The organization man is happy with what exists. As this mood controls his private life, so it controls his public attitude. Nothing so breeds acquiescence in, or indifference to, social shortcoming as daily exposure to the misjudgments, eccentricities and inanities of private organization. With the rise of the great corporation there comes a contented accommodation to the larger errors of public life, and notably those with no immediate effect on the one who observes them.
The second way in which modern organization cultivates acceptance of what comfortably exists in the age of contentment is by diminishing the role of thought itself. Especially in the higher reaches of organization, needed thought is a commitment, perhaps more precisely an intrusion, that is not to be faced but rather to be delegated. Encountering a problem, an organization man turns naturally, automatically, to a subordinate. The latter is told to get on to it. This he then does by turning to an assistant, and the delegation continues. The culture of organization runs strongly to the shifting of problems to others—to an escape from personal mental effort and responsibility. This, in turn, becomes the larger public attitude. It is for others to do the worrying, take the action. In the world of the great organization, problems are not solved but passed on.
And there is a further effect. The delegation process just cited adds ineluctably to the layers of command and to the prestige associated with command. That prestige is regularly measured by the number of the individual’s subordinates: “How many people does he have under him?” In consequence, although organization, by its nature, has a deeply static tendency as to action, it is relentlessly dynamic in the multiplication of personnel. In further consequence, the number of those responding to its attitudes and behavior patterns has a strong tendency also to increase. In the private sector of the modern economy the great corporation occupies a steadily more important position—by common calculation, the largest five hundred industrial firms in the United States account for around 60 percent of all production. Within those firms there is an intrinsic dynamic acting to increase what, by broad definition, is called managerial personnel, and with the increase in their numbers there is an increase in those subject influentially to the broad culture of contentment.
This commitment to the culture of contentment is, to repeat, common to all organization. And so are the expansive tendencies that enlarge the numbers so committed. But we come now to a radical difference between public and private organization. The difference turns specifically on the word bureaucracy.
The general reference to large organization in public service is to bureaucracy, and the connotation is uniformly adverse. This is especially true in the United States. Those who serve in large governmental agencies or departments are, it is thought, an inferior part of the citizenry. It is recognized that, as individuals, they may be diligent, personable and socially useful. Collectively they are stolid, incompetent and, above all, a burden on the society. They are “bureaucrats.”
A vital distinction must, however, be made between those in the public sector who serve the culture and goals of contentment and those whose agencies are seen as a threat. Workers in the departments of government concerned with regulatory activity, tax collection and especially with welfare services have the fully negative reputation of bureaucracy; those so employed are, collectively, intrusive, incompetent and self-serving. In contrast, those in the military establishment, in lesser measure in the Department of State, the CIA and the other intelligence agencies, and notably also in the administration of Social Security are exempt from attack. The term bureaucracy is but rarely applied to them and almost never in a condemnatory tone. Those there serving are not bureaucrats and certainly not, in the common expression, “lousy bureaucrats.” They are, generally, good and loyal public servants. It will be evident, to repeat, that those agencies and departments of government that serve contentment have a standing in public attitude and expression very different from those that collect taxes, succor the poor or enforce regulations.
The case of the military is especially to be remarked. None can doubt that the Pentagon and its civilian and military components conform in an exceptionally rigorous way to the bureaucratic mode. Policy is there proclaimed and accepted as a matter of course; thought and resulting independent action are fully surrendered. There is a surprised reaction to the occasional independent expression—to the whistle-blower. That there is overmanning is not in doubt; in past times those who were faced with workless days and weeks in the Department of Defense described themselves as suffering from Pentagonorrhea. Yet the military establishment is almost entirely exempt from the adverse attitudes reserved for, say, the urban welfare bureaucracy, that which attends the highly urgent needs of the functional underclass. The civilian and especially the uniformed personnel who make up the military power are enthusiastically hailed for their service to their country. There is no similar admiration or celebration of those who, often at greater personal danger, render assistance to the poor in the inner-city slums.
The lesson for anyone contemplating a public career is evident. Service to national defense, to foreign relations, even to the CIA, ensures public esteem. That will be the reward from public activities that are consistent with the culture of contentment. A modest glow attaches also to anyone administering or defending pensions for the old or price and income supports for often affluent farmers. There will be no like repute from dispensing aid to families with dependent children or awarding food stamps. Here, alas, one will be a bureaucrat.
There is, perhaps, a more substantive difference to be noted between the public servant and the bureaucrat. The former is heard with respect when he or she asks for public moneys; the latter’s requests are simply a burden.
The most comprehensive escape from the adverse reputation of bureaucracy, however, is found in the private sector and is reserved for those who occupy the upper ranks of the large modern corporation. Their immunity from criticism is central, even vital, to the culture of contentment. This calls for a special word.
That the large and complex business enterprise is an essential feature of modern economic life has been sufficiently noted.1 In past times the mental sclerosis associated with bureaucracy, especially in those firms that are seemingly exempt from the pressures of technological change or shifting consumer fashion, has been greatly evident and, indeed, has been much remarked. That condition in the coal and the steel industries, and particularly in the once industrially dominant United States Steel Corporation, is a well-read chapter in American economic history. The history of like enterprises in Britain and on the Continent is similar. The General Motors Corporation and, in lesser measure, the other automobile companies in the United States are now held to have a corporate culture that verges dangerously on desuetude. From this has come, at least in part, their diminished position in American and world markets.
The more visible and compelling evidence of the bureaucratic tendency in the large corporation is reported daily in the financial press, and especially when there is any softening of markets. The corporation is then described as “shedding” personnel, meaning, notably, those in the managerial or bureaucratic ranks. (From the corporate bureaucracy members are never discharged, fired or sacked, only shed.) From larger enterprises the number so dispensed with runs frequently to the thousands.
The shedding, in all normal comment, is taken as a move to lower costs and achieve greater efficiency. The virtually unasked question is what the people thus and so routinely let go were doing in the first place. Their removal is, indeed, compelling proof of the unchecked bureaucratic propensity to multiply personnel—the bureaucratic urge to delegate problem-solving and requisite thought and to enhance personal prestige by increasing the number of one’s subordinates.
Nonetheless, the large private corporation is generally exempt from the adverse implications of bureaucracy. It is not a bureaucracy but an enterprise. Those who work in it are executives, engineers, marketing specialists, advertising or public relations experts, but never or almost never bureaucrats. As in the case of the members of the military establishment or the State Department, this is an exemption that the organization men (and some women) of the great corporation are all but automatically accorded in the age of contentment.
Three concepts that contribute to the immunity of the large corporation and its management from the adverse implications of bureaucracy may be noted. It is said, first, that, unlike the public organization, the corporation is subject to the discipline of the market. The recurrent accumulation and shedding of personnel show, however, that this is not a force of undeviating rigor. Nor does formal economics in this world of imperfect competition hold such restraint to be especially severe. The often more than ample compensation that regularly accrues to the senior executives and is sanctioned by acquiescent management-appointed directors is further evidence of the elasticity of market discipline. It could be that the appropriation of public funds within which the public agency lives is, on occasion, more confining.
Also serving the disguise of the bureaucratic tendency in the modern private corporation and its leadership is the concept and vision of the entrepreneur. Original, self-motivated, innovative, welcoming risk, an executive so described is a creature of the market, the market he himself, in the frequent case, is assumed to have discovered. The entrepreneur is the economist’s greatest hero, a role celebrated by one of the discipline’s most noted figures, Joseph Alois Schumpeter.2 Here is the source, the dynamism, of economic progress. With the much revered classical entrepreneur the executives of the great corporation are accorded an honorary, if otherwise improbable, association. The head of the large business enterprise rejoices in so seeing himself and in being so seen.
His counterpart, in fact, is the army general operating with a large and compliant staff far behind the lines, who pictures himself as leading the tanks in fierce and unrelenting combat. In the early days of the great American S&L scandal, the principal official of the regulatory authority involved spoke in exculpatory terms of Charles Keating, the most notorious figure in this concerted attack on the public interest and pocketbook. He was, it was said, a “very entrepreneurial businessman.”3 An entrepreneur can, indeed, fail, but he can do no wrong.
So it is inevitable that the heads of General Motors, General Electric, Citibank and Shell, having made their way up through a bureaucracy, wish to believe that they too are entrepreneurs. Thus they gain exemption from the taint of bureaucracy, for no entrepreneur is a bureaucrat.
Finally, the great enterprise—the large modern corporation—is extensively under the protection of conventional economic education. This is still strongly oriented to the competitive market, which is populated, of necessity, by numerous small operators—the entrepreneurs again—or, if more exceptionally, by larger monopolists and oligopolists who are also fully committed to profit maximization for the firm. The bureaucratic tendency and the particular motivation of the organization men are not explored. That such tendency and such motivation exist most economists would agree, but these do not lend themselves to the geometry and equations of formal theory. They are not thought to belong in economic instruction. And perhaps there is another reason they are not more recognized: bureaucratic lethargy and incompetence would not be pleasant to teach; to do so could lead only to disturbing questions.
The inhabitants of the modem great organization, public and private, are, as we have seen, strongly conditioned to the culture of contentment. However, the relationship, as the preceding pages suggest, is complex. All are bureaucrats, but this term is reserved for those in public life who serve in organizations inimical or thought to be inimical to private contentment. Those in more accommodating roles are public servants or, on occasion, heroes of the Republic. And there is marked reluctance on the part of the members of the great private organization to accept the designation of “bureaucrat.” Subordination of the corporation to the market, the heroic mantle of the entrepreneur and the tenets of conventional economic education are all cited or used to diminish this resemblance. That the culture of contentment with its passive acceptance of short-run comfort is the ruling force in modern large-scale organization and in the great bureaucracy cannot, one ventures, be thought seriously in question.
1 I have dealt with this in detail in The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967, and later editions). I there referred to those making up the organization, and particularly those concerned with innovation, as the technostructure, a term that has gained some currency.
2 The author, most memorably, of The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934).
3 The Wall Street Journal, November 22, 1989.