Growth Of Bureaucracy Research Articles

Limits to Bureaucratic Growth.

Limits to Bureaucratic Growth.

Tactical Evolution in the French Army, 1560-1660

Trying to understand seventeenth-century European history without weighing the influence of war and military institutions is like trying to dance without listening to the music. Territorial unification, bureaucratic growth, social tension, and civil rebellion were all influenced by the style and growth of armies on the Continent. No single publication has done more to extend our knowledge of seventeenth-century military history than Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560-1660.1 This very brief but provocative essay published in 1956 has set the terms of the debate and stimulated research and writing for nearly three decades. Roberts asserted that a revolution in tactics accomplished by the Dutch statthalter Prince Maurice of Nassau (1584-1625) and the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus (1611-32) drove the older Spanish system of massive, unwieldy infantry formations off the battlefields of Europe. New strategy took advantage of well-trained mobile armies to pursue victory, instead of prolonging stalemate. At the same time, standing armies emerged as land forces grew to unprecedented proportions, giving statesmen potent weapons of war for grand schemes. However, the gargantuan armies spawned in the seventeenth century burdened society with crushing taxation, heavy-handed bureaucracies, and all the weighty trappings of absolutism. Since the initial appearance of Roberts's essay, a number of

The effect of government ownership and subsidy on performance: Evidence from the bus transit industry

Several theories have been advanced to predict difference in behavior of government-owned vs private firms, such as theories of bureaucratic growth, inefficiency, and concentration on vote-maximizing service with neglect of other important characteristics of service. This study tests the above theories in a declining industry, the U.S. urban bus transify industry of 1960–1975. The analysis bridges the period before and during the major federal capital grant program which was initiated under the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964. The empirical results indicate that subsidy at the federal level is associated with higher costs and lower real price and a redistribution of service toward an expanded area, served less frequently. Local and state subsidy is associated with smaller increases in costs and smaller decreases in frequency of service and ridership. The form of public ownership does affect performance, but the unknown size of inter-agency cross-subsidization and tax benefits makes comparison tenuous without case-level investigation. The conclusion is reached that although the bureaucratic growth, inefficiency and vote-maximization theories are supported, inefficiency and bureaucratic growth are associated with passive sponsorship and large size of firm, rather than with public ownership, per se.

III. Administration

The primary goals of the imperial administration were the maintenance of law and order and the collection of taxes to meet military costs and to provide public buildings, entertainments, and handouts in the city of Rome. To achieve these ends the emperors of the early empire took the Republican system of senatorial administration and expanded it, employing slaves and freedmen of their own familia, as well as increasing numbers of equestrians. Growth of bureaucracy appears as a dominant theme in historical studies of the early empire, one author representing the development from the beginning to the end of our period as a change from a ‘monarchie personelle’ to a ‘monarchie bureaucratique’. A description of the administrative organization of the state followed by a discussion of the main lines of development will enable us to test the accuracy of this characterization. We will want in particular to ask: how complex did the organization become by the early second century, and how was the personnel for administrative posts chosen?

Parkinson’s Law and absorptive capacity

Parkinson’s Law, or the principle that work expands to fill the time available for its completion and that the number of subordinates multiply at a fixed rate regardless of the amount of work produced was postulated by Professor Parkinson as a satire as well as a serious social comment on the development and growth of bureaucracy. Over the years it has come to be used as a shorthand expression for the inefficiency and mindless expansion of officialdom.1 Absorptive capacity, on the other hand, is defined as the amount of capital which a country can utilise productively in the short run. This article analyses the relationship of these two concepts in the context of development aid.

A Concept of Administrative Futures

The problems of development in new organizations are examined by considering a case study — Radio-Québec, the educational television authority of the Canadian province of Quebec. The typical process of organizational growth and development is one wherein the initial confusion, uncertainties, and inefficiencies come to be replaced by a degree of goal certainty, efficiency in the performance of the organization's tasks, and more 'self- confidence' with respect to the organization's role in its operating environment. Yet in Radio-Québec these 'normal' processes of bureaucratic growth and development seemed not to occur. Instead of development leading to less confusion in the perfor mance of organizational tasks, it led to a breakdown of internal consensus. The Radio-Québec managing elite was forced, in effect, to create an entirely 'new' organiza tion a second time. The study demonstrates that growth of maturity may be accompanied by dysfunctions produced by attempts to bring about more rapid developments of the organization.

Saudi Arabia : An unprecedented growth of Wealth with an unparalleled growth of Bureaucracy

Saudi Arabia : An unprecedented growth of Wealth with an unparalleled growth of Bureaucracy

The School and the Reduction of Inequality∗

Those of us who know Torsten Husen will recognise here all the qualities which make him a man both competent and respected in his field: precision in the analysis of facts, moderation in the treatment of the inevitably political aspects of education and wisdom in the general approach. This particular book follows one of the two great traditions of research in educational sociology; the microsociological trend which aims to demonstrate the factors which explain, in terms of the environment of both family and school, the inequality of opportunities in teaching. Of course, frequent reference is made to the other trend, the macrosociological, which tends to analyse the relationship between social structures and the phenomenon of inequality of opportunities. But these references are often made to underline the character of these works, whether it be perilous, or, as where Marxists are concerned, naive. On the other hand, Husen's book highlights perfectly the paradox which exists between the egalitarian ideology of school and the fact that the industrial society, or post-industrial, if one prefers this terminology, remains a meritocracy, that is to say, that it appreciates above all outstanding abilities, and it relies on the school system to determine these abilities. Husen goes as far as to say that school is charged with the creation of these abilities by a system of selection which he analyses particularly well. He seems then to admit that the primary function of school is the perpetuation of social hierarchies. This analysis had already been made by many people, the first of whom was Pitirim Sorokin in I927 (Social Mobility, reprinted in I959 in Social and Cultural Mobility, Glencoe, Ill., Free Press) who, with perfect conciseness, affirmed that school should sort out pupils in such a way as to ensure the closest possible correspondence between the capabilities of the pupils and those demanded by the different social positions. This function of selection has since been the object of much criticism, from both Right and Left, as Husen demonstrates. The author then underlines another paradox of the school system: the constant growth of bureaucracy occurring with a similar growth in the demand to participate by those involved in school: children, parents and teachers. At this point, I personally would have preferred Torsten Husen to have insisted more on the 'negative feed-back loop' of increased bureaucracy which I would like to illustrate by the following example. As Husen recalls of Sweden in the rural school of some years ago (but not so long ago as that, I was brought up in such a school in the Belgian Ardennes in 1950) there was one single classroom in which children of all levels were together and each one followed each subject at his own level irrespective of his age or of his level in other subjects (a magnificent realisation of the Quaker adage 'The Spirit speaking to my own condition'). Moreover, the more advanced children helped the less advanced children (it is thus that I discovered at the age of 9 years that my friend Lambert Meunier, who was I3 years old, was dyslexic

Voters, bureaucrats and legislators: A rational choice perspective on the growth of bureaucracy

The claim that government is excessively bureaucratic can be interpreted as an assertion about inefficient factor proportions in the production of public goods. The rational choice theory of electoral competition is extended in this paper to include the election of representatives from separate districts, ombudsman activities by legislators, self-interested bureaucrats and production functions for public activities that have bureaucratic and nonbureaucratic arguments. If the demand for public goods grows exogenously through time, the model predicts increasingly inefficient factor proportions yet a growing advantage for incumbent legislators when they seek reelection.

Bureaucratic Development and Economic Growth

Providing a good standard of living for all the peoples of Africa means that there must be more than simple economic growth. The alleviation of tremendous poverty requires special measures to ensure that those at the bottom of the social structure benefit by receiving part of the product of growth. Two problems of equal importance involve: first, the necessity for changing the life-styles of peoples and the economic forces of production of centuries; and secondly, the creation of the appropriate political apparatus to guarantee a more suitable distribution of the new goods that are produced. Francophone planners soon after the end of World War II used the word encadrement to convey a sense of the processes and institutions involved in coping with these problems.

Democracy in education

As our nation celebrates its bicentennial, we are again reminded of effects of forces from abroad which have had an impact on our own development. Our historical democratic antecedents were forces and changes released as European countries threw off yoke of feudalism and moved through absolute monarchies to contemporary nation-state. Weber' has written that, the growth of bureaucracy in government, business, religion, and education while distinguishing modern from medieval world, also holds seed of possibility of moving toward one of two alternatives-a future of freedom or despotism. These forces leading to increasing centralization are, in his words, the fundamental forces of rationalization of government which if followed to its extended course of evolution reaches a totalitarian mode of bureaucratic organization. Our form of democracy has seen bureaucracy grow as machinery used to enhance attainment of its objectives. The principal of rule by people is challenged by size and complexity of bureaucracy. The interesting question arises as to whether there comes a time when latter takes over

Bureaucracy, Political Parties, and Political Development

The growing role of governmental bureaucracy has been one of the most noted and discussed characteristics of developing political systems. The phenomenon of bureaucratic intervention in politics, already discernible in the 1950's in many of these states, has, so it seems, become the rule rather than the exception in the years that have followed. Despite the prevalence of the politicized bureaucracy, however, and the amount of discussion engendered by the phenomenon, die sources of bureaucratic growth and dominance in the developing states remain obscure. Most analysts emphasize the superior organization of the bureaucracy and argue that this organization, reinforced by die transfer of techniques from abroad and uncontested because of weak indigenous political institutions, provides much of the explanation for the aggrandizement of the bureaucracy in die policy-making process.

The Growth of Bureaucracy in Brazil, 1808–1821

In late November of 1807 the Portuguese government was loaded on to a fleet of naval and merchant vessels, transported across the South Atlantic and deposited in Rio de Janeiro. On board were fourteen members of the Royal Family; the Counsellors of State; ministers; Justices of the Court of Appeals and the High Court; the upper echelons of the army and navy; the hierarchy of the church; a full quota of high society; a respectable contingent of the professional, scientific, literary, artistic and business elements; a horde of bureaucrats; and as many rank and file citizens as could secure passage. Also on board were the contents of the royal treasury; the store of diamonds derived from the crown monopoly; silver plate, jewels, books, cash and other portable assets; furnishings for a royal chapel; the royal library; a printing press; and a mass of government records.

Notes on Modernist Art

MODERNIST ART is not to be identified with art of avant-garde. For avant-garde painters-I think of dadaists, and of Duchamp-have not always been modernists in art and contemporary avant-garde (in part descended from them) is defiantly anti-modernist. Indeed, this is so conspicuously case that, pending suggestion of something more informative, term post-modern has come to describe them. Still less is modernist art to be identified with contemporary art. Neither Dr. Zhivago nor The Leopard is a modernist novel and Edward Hopper is not a modernist painter. This will establish, at once, that finest contemporary art need not be modernist. Nevertheless, from time of Mallarm6, and more especially from period just before World War I when tonality was suspended and cubism invented, to eve of World War II, modernism was great movement in arts. Even after war it was responsible for many superb works: one has only to think of late Matisse, Stravinsky-Balanchine Agon, or Mies' Seagram Building to see this. But this time was, already, a period of consolidation and when we come to Borges, Boulez, and Morris Louis we know that we are approaching end of something, though of something great. The idea of modern, especially as it has been elaborated in classical sociology, by no means provides key to idea of modernism in arts. But something like its distinction between traditional and modern society as elaborated in, say, distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, finds expression in such critical doctrines as Eliot's theory of dissociation of sensibility and Benjamin's of decline of aura. Then, too, such sociological themes as decline of traditional religion, rise of science and technology, growth of bureaucracy and of urban civilization, spread of anomie and sense of rootlessness, are themselves inevitably treated in modern literature. It would be tedious to review developments from the death of God to encounter with an Unreal City in order

Sir George Harrison and the growth of bureaucracy in the early nineteenth century

Sir George Harrison and the growth of bureaucracy in the early nineteenth century

The Growth of Bureaucracy in School Systems

The Growth of Bureaucracy in School Systems

Our Wonderland of Bureaucracy: A Study of the Growth of Bureaucracy in the Federal Government and Its Destructive Effect upon the Constitution

Our Wonderland of Bureaucracy: A Study of the Growth of Bureaucracy in the Federal Government and Its Destructive Effect upon the Constitution