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4.0FabricofOrganizationsForces2.pptxThe Fabric of Organizations: Forces
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How do organizations adapt to the fury of forces that roil in them and in the society surrounding them?
To answer this question, we need to weave the threads of theory into a fabric.
Sometimes they weave a tapestry, other times a drop cloth.
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Data, Information, And Organizational Knowledge
Information is processed data.
The accumulation of information is knowledge.
Knowledge that means something to us is what reinforces our behavior
or it’s what changes us.
Organizational knowledge, or organizational intelligence, is not only the process of collecting yet one more datum to complete a puzzle, but,
it is also a process of interpreting data to solve mysteries.
Despite the fact that todays organizations have many times more data, Americans are any more knowledgeable about public affairs than they were in 1950.
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Dealing with the Uncertainty of Knowledge
One of the more intriguing ways in which organizations distort knowledge is called uncertainty absorption, whereby information that
initially is regarded as uncertain and “soft” by the people who collect it becomes increasingly certain and “hard” as it is sent up through the decision-making hierarchy.
In closed, centralized organizations, information distortion often is intertwined with personal power.
Folks, like everyone else is afraid to tell the leader the truth.
Even when people trust each other and are working as a team, both of which are emblematic of the open, decentralized organization,
information still may fail to reach the people who need it and can act on it.
In decentralized organizations, the pathology appears to be less one of fear and more one of fumbling.
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Information and the Hierarchy
If knowledge changes us, then it is disconcerting to know that organizations change knowledge.
It also creates “turf wars”
It appears that bureaucratic jealousies seems to be particularly present in public organizations, whether centralized or decentralized, concerns “turf,” or agency rivalries that
revolve around the control of areas of responsibility.
Unfortunately their is no panacea for curing pathologies of organizational information.
We do know, however, that there is a model of hierarchical distortion:
the more hierarchical layers there are, the more organizational subunits that are charged with similar responsibilities,
and the more that information is “handled” as it is passed up, down, and around the bureaucracy, the more likely it is that the information will be delayed and distorted, and the less likely that it will reach someone who can intelligently act on it.
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Organizational Knowledge and Strategic Decision Making
All of us are inundated by data and we often are unable to salvage from this flood the knowledge that we need to make good decisions.
In psychology, decision-making is regarded as the cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several alternative possibilities.
Decision-making is the process of identifying and choosing alternatives based on the values, preferences and beliefs of the decision-maker.
In reality no one person could ever have enough information to make rational strategic decisions.
It appears that market and other environmental forces provided the best information for decision making.
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Information as Symbol
“The acts of seeking and using information in decisions have important symbolic value” because they cloak their actors with legitimacy, “a necessary property of effective decisions.”
Hence, the “conspicuous consumption of information,” whether done consciously or not, “is a sensible strategy for decision makers” because their decisions not only are more readily implemented, but organizations with elaborate information systems also house more effective decision makers than those without them.
The symbolism syndrome seems to be particularly present in public administration;
the consumption of information is “more conspicuous in policy making than in engineering,
more conspicuous in the public sector than in the private,
more conspicuous at the top of an organization than at the bottom.”
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Strategic Decision Making In Organizations
Research on how information is used in decision making implies that the process is less than rational.
And, to an extraordinary extent, it is not rational.
The principal reason underlying this darker side of decision making is that the people who make decisions,
like all people, are often less than logical.
All human beings make decisions on the basis of their decision premises, or the unique values and viewpoints held by each organizational member, and on
which he or she bases every decision he or she makes regarding the organization.
For example: The values of profitability, competitiveness, and customer orientation have a greater influence on business decisions;
in public organizations, values such as legitimacy, lawfulness, accountability, and impartiality play a larger role.”
Note: Every decision maker is boxed in by mental and social bounds it can lead to a form of Dysrationalia or the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence.
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Bounded Rationality
It appears that the human species is beset by bounded rationality; that is, the reasoning powers of the human mind are bound to a small and simple plot compared with
the vastness and complexity of the territory spanned by the problems that human minds are expected to comprehend and solve.
Research buttresses the reality of the bounded brain.
The human mind can distinguish a maximum of just seven categories of phenomena at a time, but beyond that number loses track.
Emotion colors decision making. A decision is first made as an emotional response to one’s environment, and this is especially the case when there have been recent and dramatic events in it; consequently, decision makers often misstate the problem to be solved.
If anger is among the decision maker’s emotional responses, the likelihood of unethical decisions increases, but if fear or little emotion are present, then ethical decisions become more possible.
Although this emotional phase is sometimes criticized as an impediment to rational decision making, emotion is central to decision making; people who cannot process emotions also struggle to make decisions.
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Bounded Rationality and “Satisficing” Decisions
More rational responses to environmental events overlay the initial emotional ones.
When this phase is reached, decision makers usually are overcautious, favoring stability over change, and tend to prefer information that protects them against anticipated losses over information that they can use to make gains.
“Bounded rationality results in suboptimal or what can be called “satisficing” decisions. If not optimal, then, what are they?
It’s those choices that tend to satisfied the makers of decisions and sufficed enough for the organization to get by.
Many decision makers typically use heuristic thinking (or “rules of thumb”), which is invariably flawed, and base their decisions on their perception of the status quo, rather than
on an objective comparison of known variables. Options that provide quick returns generally are preferred to those that delay them, even though delay may bring superior returns.
“In short, our brains are naturally lazy.”
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Victims of Groupthink
Regrettably, in addition to their own bounded minds, decision makers are limited by other factors as well.
Because stress accompanies decision making, avoidance and denial are frequently the handmaidens of the decision process.
When stressed decision makers are making decisions within the context of a tightly knit in-group,
“groupthink” is the consequence.
Groupthink is an over-conformity among decision makers that displaces critical thinking, and
“is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against out-groups.”
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The Making of Good Decisions
Vigilant Decision Making Vigilant decision making consists of employing ways to encourage the group to participate more effectively in making good decisions and to minimize groupthink. These group-improving means include:
employing a large number of techniques to encourage dissent;
bringing in “representatives of people in the organization with different points of view,” rather than relying solely on “trusted staff”;
critically assessing the costs and risks of each choice;
and plumbing diverse sources of knowledge.
Fast Decision Making Not only do good decision makers gather more data and counsel more extensively than poor decision makers when making decisions,
they also develop more alternatives to solve problems.
Counter-intuitively, even though these activities are time consuming, they nevertheless make their decisions more rapidly than do those who do not engage in them.
These unexpected patterns of information-sensitive, advice-seeking, option-generating—yet speedy—decision making lead to “superior performance” by executives.
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Thinking Dispositions
Thinking dispositions are rational, psychological, decision-making touchstones that, surprisingly, do not correlate, or, at best, only weakly so, with cognitive ability. They include:
a capacity for thoughtful reflection;
digging out information before deciding;
trying to match one’s degree of certainty with the strength of the evidence;
examining one’s biases and correcting for them;
a willingness to wait until good solutions become apparent;
and consciously countering confirmation bias, or the regrettable reality that first impressions “are remarkably perseverant and unresponsive to new input, even when such input logically negates the original bias of the impressions.”
As one ages the likelihood of one using thinking dispositions lessens, and they are partially replaced by a greater reliance on bias and irrationality;
the consequence is riskier decisions.
Note: Those public administrators who have established reputations for excellence when confronted with making a particular type of tough decision were much less likely
to consult any advisers and to engage in any “information-gathering of some sort.
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The Bounds of Organizational Rationality
Just as the rationality of organizational members is bounded, so is the rationality of organizations themselves.
Types of Organizational Decision Making How an organization makes decisions depends on whether its stakeholders agree or disagree about what their organization should do (that is, its goals),
and agree or disagree about what causes the attainment of those goals.
Efficiency and Analytical Decision Making In organizations in which everyone agrees on organizational objectives and how to fulfill them, efficiency is readily apparent.
Because efficiency is obvious in businesses, analytical decision making is dominant; there is little or no debate about cause and effect, and decisions are made on the basis of shared perceptions.
Effectiveness and Judgmental Decision Making In many public and non-profit organizations efficiency is very difficult to determine.
Effectiveness, or an organization’s ability to fully complete its tasks, however, is usually easier to assess.
Note: In organizations, in which members still agree about goals but are uncertain about how to achieve them,
decisions are made judgmentally.
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Compromising, or Bargaining, Decision Making
In those organizations in which members believe that they know what causes what, but who disagree about organizational goals, neither efficiency nor effectiveness is clear.
So what is a decider to do?
Under these conditions, compromising, or bargaining, decision making is in order.
The classic example is when any legislative decision maker agrees that a proposed law will cause certain outcomes, but disagree about the desirability of those outcomes.
Inspirational and/or Authoritarian Decision Making
What sort of strategies can an organization use when its decision makers disagree about both goals and causality?
In some organizations in the third sector seem to exemplify this combination, and their members are not merely uncertain about whether or not they are achieving their goals;
they are uncertain even about what those goals are.
Under these circumstances, inspirational decision making, or authoritarian decision making, or both, are favored.
Inspirational and authoritarian decision making are employed in these organizations because the alternative could be chaos;
when decision makers are unable to discern efficiency and effectiveness, rational (i.e., analytical), or even partially rational (i.e., judgmental), decision-making “strategies” simply are not possible.
“Inspiring” the organization, and/or cracking down on dissidents are the only decision-making options left.
Mismatching Organizations and Decision Making
Unfortunately, in nearly six out of ten strategic decisions, decision makers select a strategy that is inappropriate to the kinds of bounds that constrain their organization.
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Organized Anarchies and the Garbage Can of Decision Making The messiest forms of decision making—that is, judgmental, compromising, inspirational, and authoritarian decision making—all associate with public or nonprofit organizations.
These messy methods characterize organized anarchies, which are composed of a “loose collection of ideas” in which participants do not define their preferences very precisely and do not fully understand what their organization actually does.
Organized anarchies use an erratic, irrational decision-making process that is a figurative
“garbage can.”
In making decisions, the organized anarchy “bumbles along, and discovers preferences through action more than it
acts on the basis of preferences,” resulting in decisions that are “a collection of choices looking for problems … solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work.”
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Organized Anarchies
The messiest forms of decision making—that is, judgmental, compromising, inspirational, and authoritarian decision making—
all associate with public or nonprofit organizations.
These messy methods characterize organized anarchies, which are composed of a “loose collection of ideas” in which participants do not define their preferences very precisely
and do not fully understand what their organization actually does.
In making decisions, the organized anarchy “bumbles along, and discovers preferences through action more than it acts on the basis of preferences,”
resulting in decisions that are “a collection of choices looking for problems … solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work.”
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The Implementation of Strategic Decisions
Just as making big decisions is beset by bounded rationality, so is implementing them.
Studies found that decision makers rely on four basic implementation tactics these are:
persuasion,
nudging,
participation,
and intervention.
When making decisions, public administrators “place too great an emphasis on bargaining …
but they do seem to understand the limits of analysis,”
Public administrators believe that negotiating, in and of itself, legitimizes decisions, and thereby creates, unfortunately,
“a false perception of support for a decision.”
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Persuasion consumes the most time of all four tactics, and seems to be favored by public administrators, who spend an inordinate amount of their time talking or nudging subordinates and peers;
“this talk accomplishes administration.”
“Nudge” is shorthand for the framing of policies and procedures in ways (such as by simplifying choices and sending reminders)
that more effectively persuade people to adopt and implement them.
Participation refers to stakeholders cooperatively implementing the decision. The broader and deeper the participation, the greater the rate of successful adoption of the decision.
Participative decision making is markedly present in government agencies.
Intervention is used to justifying a need for change, establishing new performance standards,
demonstrating the feasibility of the decision and the improvements that will result from it.
Note: In contrast to executives in other sectors, those in government appear to rely heavily on intervention, overcoming “bureaucratic obstacles” by
introducing training programs, demonstrating the benefits of new policies, consulting with stakeholders, and persistence to get their way.
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A Complex and Slow Decision Process
Governments’ decision makers must deal with vastly more, and more complex, decision criteria that are far broader in scope than those in business,
who are measurably more likely to focus on a single and straightforward datum—that of financial performance—when making decisions.7
Public executives who have business experience view governments as conservative cultures that are slow to change, and research suggests
that decisions are indeed made more slowly in public organizations than in private ones.
Slower decision making may be a product of the fact that civilian agencies are less likely to take risks than private companies,
regardless of the organizational mission.
It is noted that governments’ decision makers swirl sporadically through a “vortex” of intense meetings and conversations with each other,
and are much more likely than those in private organizations to engage in both formal and informal interaction with others when making decisions.
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Consulting with Whom?
Public administrators network extensively with internal “peers and underlings” when making decisions. This is a good thing:
A thorough review concludes that “the greatest organizational gains from employee participation [in decision making] may come from producing better decisions.”
In marked contrast to business managers, however, when public administrators make decisions they often “discount networking” with “external constituencies,” notably agency clients, citizens, and oversight bodies. This is not such a good thing.
If clients and overseers were more involved in public administrators’ decision making, it would “improve their chances of success.”
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The Decision Making Quality
Decision making in public organizations, in contrast to its practice in private ones, seems to be:
a process that relies more on bargaining than analysis;
is slower, sloppier, and murkier;
is more intense, constrained, and complicated;
is more consultative, but containing elements of groupthink;
and is risk averse, but unwittingly risky.
In one of the few attempts to match the decision-making techniques used by each sector with the quality and successful implementation of the decisions made, it was determined that government managers
who relied primarily on soliciting the views of experts and used hard data made the highest quality decisions.
Obviously, decision makers who ignore their clients and bosses can produce decisions that “can be very dangerous” to the decision makers,
especially “if an oversight body opposes” their decisions. Yet, this may be precisely the decision-making situation in public organizations.
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Decision Making Roles in Nonprofit Organizations
It must be noted that public agencies are far more influenced by factors in their external environments than are private companies and nonprofit associations.
Consultative Decision Making
Nonprofit strategic decision makers appear to be uniquely consultative; they “recycle” decisions back to earlier stages in the decision-making process, and take many more “steps” than in the private sector.
Conflictive Decision Making Conflicts break out earlier in the decision-making process of non-profit organizations than in for-profit ones, and third-sector executives—who believe that conflict defines issues more sharply and thus produces better decisions—are less averse to conflict than are their corporate counterparts, who think just the opposite.
Riskier Decision Making Third-sector administrators are especially fond of throwing the dice, and have been known to radically change the very missions of their organizations if they thought it useful, an option not available to public agencies and a limited one for private companies.
Managers and professionals in the independent sector report that their organization encourages them “to take risks,” compared with federal administrators and for-profit managers.
Nonprofit employees also are much less concerned with compensation and job security than are those in government and the private sector.
With the obvious exception of the public sector’s dominance of life-or-death decision making, these characteristics strongly suggest that decision making in the third sector is a riskier business than in the other two.
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Position Vs Personal Power
There are two types of administrative or leadership power that facilitate subordinates’ acceptance of their executives’ roles.
One is position power, a category that includes four “power bases.” They are:
Control, specifically of information and the work environment;
reward power, or the positive recognition of another;
coercive power, or the capacity to punish;
and legitimate power, or the acceptance of the leader by others.
The other kind of power is personal power, and this includes three power bases:
Expert power, or the perception that the leader is knowledgeable;
referent power, or the personal attraction that a leader holds for others;
and charisma, or the leader’s ability and will to exert great change.
Corporate managers exercise a very high level of control over the critical positional power bases of rewards, coercion, and legitimacy, but public administrators
have little, if any, control over them and are reduced to relying on personal power bases to lead.
It is noteworthy in this regard that public employees perceive their executives to be far more inspirational and personally involved with them than do corporate employees.124
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The Mechanisms of Control
Once administrators have established their power bases, then they can exercise greater power. They do this through six major “mechanisms of administrative control.”
These mechanisms include:
supervision, or the direct observation and provision of feedback to subordinates;
input control, or the cutting or increasing of resources to subunits;
behavior control, or the structuring by administrators of individual and group activities;
output control, or the evaluation of subunits’ productivity;
selection-socialization control, or the internalization of selected norms and values in subunits;
environmental control, or the constraints imposed by the organization’s external task environment (public administrators implement environmental control by obtaining feedback from their communities).
Public administrators use all six mechanisms in surprisingly broad and balanced ways.
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Public Organization: A Dynamic Environment
The tasks that public administrators must administer are far more “complex” than those managed by private managers, rendering public administration all the more difficult.
The Whirlwind Public administrators have little control over how they use their time, and are more “rushed” to get things done. They are far more consumed with managing crises, and devote far more time to doing so, than their private-sector counterparts.
More effective public administrators are more flexible and accord scant effort to “time management” and planning than less effective public administrators.
The Pressures To “accomplish” their convoluted and ill-defined missions, public administrators must confront many more “conflicting environmental demands” and “external stakeholders” than business managers.
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Lessons Learned
Public administrators have learned some practical lessons about how to administer well. Here are the main ones.
■ Hire with care, and be alert to an employee’s performance during the probationary period.
■ Engage new employees with a welcoming first-year program that introduces them to the agency’s culture.
■ Communicate to build trust. Ask employees for their feedback and advice, and tell them whether you used it; meet regularly with each employee to review progress; and lead by example.
■ Hold employees accountable for their performance.
■ Closely link recognition, rewards, and sanctions to performance.
■ Give all employees the opportunity to grow and develop.
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Change Agents And Their Technology
Governments are not associated with swift-paced change. As one study put it, “high-publicness organizations … show a slow change rate” and “a low rate of change.”138 But public organizations do change.
Without question, the organization’s technology, or what the organization does and how it does it, is central to what any organization is, and changing its technology causes systemic change throughout any organization.
However, legislatures rarely, if ever, allow a government agency to change what it does, and public technology is itself resistant to change.
Executives who have served in the private and public sectors believe, accurately, that, compared to business, government and nonprofits are driven by processes.
Changing a process in any organization involves extensive convincing and coordinating, and is a much slower affair than changing a product.
Note: It appears that public managers are more change-oriented than managers in business organizations.
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Paladins of Public Change
Who is more likely to cause change in governments—elected officeholders, nonprofit public-interest groups, agency clients, citizens, or stodgy old bureaucrats?
The bureaucrats, hands down. “Despite controls … career public servants” at all levels of government “do innovate,” and initiate innovations far more frequently than any other group.
The environment that surrounds and suffuses the public organization appears to be the primal engine of its change.
All legislatures pass laws that change their governments’ agencies.
Some statutes radically open public organizations to all manner of penetration by innumerable environmental forces, and to an extent that is unheard of in the other sectors.
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Who or What Pressures or Impedes Change?
Government agencies are pressured to change when specific elements in their environments change.
Agencies that are dominated by professionals are pushed to adjust when outside observers perceive a loss of professional competence;
those that are protected by patrons, such as legislators, are threatened with change when they lose their patrons;
and those that have endlessly churned the same old unresponsive rut suddenly are challenged by new and sustained expectations.
Pressure to change is no guarantee of change. Frustratingly, even when public administrators proactively address these challenges, change still remains stymied unless
the agency’s leaders can gain “the support of oversight bodies,” and then only when agencies “are allowed to be responsive” to environmental demands. “
Creating such arrangements is always difficult and often impossible.”1
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Laws That Can Impede Change
Sunshine laws require that agencies provide, with some restrictions, to those who request it any information that they have about anyone and anything.
The federal government, all the states, and the District of Columbia have sunshine laws.
The federal sunshine law is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) of 1966, which exempts information pertaining to national security, citizen privacy, and Congress.
Some 700,000 FOIA requests, on average, are received and processed each year by all agencies, at a cost of more than $480 million.
To meet an FOIA request, federal administrators must execute no fewer than fifteen distinct tasks, and it takes from ten to 100 median days to do so. This is very expensive.
Many public agencies are legislatively required to appoint advisory committees that recommend policies.
In Washington alone, there are about a thousand active committees in any given year composed of more than 70,000 members advising around fifty agencies, at an annual cost of more than $350 million, averaged over ten years.
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Federal Rulemaking and Special Interest Power
Federal agencies spend, on average, about four years (ranging from one year to an astonishing fourteen) to make a rule.
This vast amount of time implies that agencies must deal with formidable forces when making rules, and they do—specifically, special interests.
Special interests view agency rulemaking with great seriousness because an agency’s “rule” can amount to a major public policy.
Agency rulemaking is relatively unconstrained by the president, Congress, and the courts;
it is interests that wield the power.
These interests are effective.
Federal agencies alter 49 percent of their decisions in favor of lobbyists purely as a result of the formal notice-and-comment process.
Even allowing for a bit of braggadocio, it is nonetheless notable that business interests enjoying a “disproportionate influence over rule-making outputs.”
Perhaps because federal rule makers are concerned about the disproportionate influence of special interests, the feds fail to notify the public that it can comment them.
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State Rulemaking and Special Interest Power
All states and the District of Columbia have administrative procedure acts,
and they open agencies to a startling quantum of special interest power.
Special interests’ general influence with state agencies that are making rules is impressive;
77 percent of state lobbyists submit comments on proposed rules and even “help draft regulations,” and more than half engage “in regulatory negotiations.”
Administrative procedure acts are crucial in both the access and influence of special interests.
The greater the access to state agencies enabled by an administrative procedure act, the higher that agency heads will rank the impact of interest groups on their agencies’ rulemaking, an opinion fortified by fact:
“As the interactions between … agencies and third parties increase, so too does the influence of these parties over agency policies and decisions.”
Access brings results. “Interest group power … is significantly influential” in an estimated 80 percent of state agency rulemaking.
As with federal patterns, business interests dominate the states’ notice-and-comment process, and benefit most from it relative to other groups.
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Environmental Forces On The Inner Workings Of Government
Perhaps of greater impact on the inner workings of government agencies are not laws, but rather environmental forces.
Environmental forces are those situations and relationships that influence decisions makers located in government, it’s legislatures, which in turn
influence the distribution of budgets, make laws and have an obvious impact on public bureaucracies.
Even in these pure power relationships, there are unspoken subtleties.
For example: States with congressional committee members who oversee the Federal Emergency Management Agency receive much larger disaster-relief funds than
those states without them, even though the emergencies are of comparable severity.
Note: The Internal Revenue Service audits far fewer individual income tax returns from taxpayers in congressional districts that are important electorally to the president
or which have representatives on key oversight committees.
Other environmental forces do not even know that they are forces.
Whether they are rough or refined, environmental forces change the accountability, structure, hierarchy, procedures, and autonomy of public organizations far more profoundly than those pressures that alter private and nonprofit organizations.
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What Is A Bureaucracy?
Bureaucracy refers to both a body of non-elective government officials and an administrative policy-making group.
Historically, a bureaucracy was a government administration managed by departments staffed with non-elected officials.
Today, bureaucracy is the administrative system governing any large institution, whether publicly owned or privately owned.
The public administration in many countries is an example of a bureaucracy, but so is the centralized hierarchical structure of a business firm.
Standard dictionaries generally agree on the following: Bureaucracy is a combination of organizational hierarchy and red tape.
Hierarchy refers to layers of administrative units ranked one above the other. Red tape is a large number of reports, forms, procedures, and, most especially, rules.
Hierarchy and red tape are symbiotic.
Hierarchy produces red tape: “the larger the number of hierarchical levels, the greater the demand for explicit rules.”
And red tape produces hierarchy: legislative rulemaking adds to “the structural complexity of bureaucratic action” in all sectors.
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How Much Hierarchy Is Too Much?
Two-fifths of federal employees at all ranks say that, in their agencies, there are “too many layers of supervisors and managers” between them and top management, compared
to less than a fourth each of business and nonprofit employees,
Anthony Downs’s famous law of hierarchy contends that the taller (i.e., the more hierarchical layers) and more complex the hierarchy,
the more effort and expense that are required for “internal” administration to the detriment of “external” achievement.
In the public sector, hierarchy can both undermine and improve
organizational effectiveness
Where hierarchy contributes most to public organizational effectiveness is in those agencies that are playing defense.
Greater hierarchy associates with centralized decision making, which, in turn, “works best” in defending the organization against external threats.
Lesser hierarchy correlates with decentralized decision making, which works best when agencies are prospecting for new opportunities in their environments.
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Ribbons of Red Tape & Bureaucratic Rules
Public organizations are wrapped in more red tape than are private and nonprofit ones (the independent sector has the least red tape)—ribbons more—
that are spooled out almost entirely by external sources, such as special interests and legislatures.
Reams of Reports
A basic building block of red tape is reports.
The annual cost of reports are millions of dollars. Many go unread by congressional members and staffers, one staffer stated,
“We used them as doorstops.” Literally.
Nevertheless, reports seem to stick around; one analysis concluded that only about 6 percent could be usefully abandoned,
although Congress has identified only six-tenths of 1 percent that could be eliminated or consolidated.
Rules Rule, a bureaucracy’s concentrate on the centrality of rules in red tape can have the same or larger social impact
as a legislature’s laws.
It seems that the amount of government rules more than doubles every decade because “the stock of rules expands due to a powerful internal dynamic:
that is, rules breed rules.
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Green Tape
Rules need not be “red tape” in the sense that they foment negativity among public administrators.
Rules can be green tape, or well-formulated regulations that facilitate “higher rule abidance” and, thereby, greater agency efficiency.
“Compliance with rules … can be an essential element of both a project’s success and its accountability.”
Written (not spoken) rules that are not overly controlling, whose purposes are understood by stakeholders, and which clearly work effectively,
“significantly correlate” with green tape. Consistency in applying rules, oddly, seems not to matter.
The most effective rules are neither overly vague nor overly prescriptive, in that those “moderate” rules that balance flexibility of implementation with clear guidelines
are the most effective and productive.
In fact, when rules violate either of these ends,
the possibility of public corruption is enhanced.
Note: Rigid rules and inflexible procedures help assure that bureaucrats and citizens alike are treated fairly, impartially, and equally.
In a word, red tape can provide justice, an idea that is central to democratic government.
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