Parkinson’s Law quantified: three investigations on bureaucratic inefficiency

Abstract

We formulate three famous, descriptive essays of Parkinson on bureaucratic inefficiency in aquantifiable and dynamical socio-physical framework. In the first model we showhow the use of recent opinion formation models for small groups can be used tounderstand Parkinson’s observation that decision-making bodies such as cabinets orboards become highly inefficient once their size exceeds a critical ‘Coefficient ofInefficiency’, typically around 20. A second observation of Parkinson—which issometimes referred to as Parkinson’s Law—is that the growth of bureaucratic oradministrative bodies usually goes hand in hand with a drastic decrease of its overallefficiency. In our second model we view a bureaucratic body as a system of a flowof workers, who enter, become promoted to various internal levels within thesystem over time, and leave the system after having served for a certain time.Promotion usually is associated with an increase of subordinates. Within the proposedmodel it becomes possible to work out the phase diagram under which conditionsof bureaucratic growth can be confined. In our last model we assign individualefficiency curves to workers throughout their life in administration, and compute theoptimum time to give them the old age pension, in order to ensure a maximum ofefficiency within the body—in Parkinson’s words we compute the ‘Pension Point’.