About ecology

Nonprofit organizations also exhibit excessive bureaucratic expansion. For example, in the decade 1975-85 college administrative staffs increased by almost two-thirds, many times more than the modest increases in the faculty and student body during the same period. "Congressional logrolling, bitter service rivalries and massive bureaucratic inertia are the enemies of military preparedness, blocking reforms that are desperately needed to prepare the military for the 1990s and beyond."

Increased bureaucratic complexity is apparent to every American taxpayer in the forms and procedures that are required. A recent commissioner of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service agrees that "the tax law, in large part, may no longer be administrable by the IRS and no longer comprehensible by most taxpayers and many of their advisors." Business and individuals are reported to have spent in 1984 more than 1.8 billion hours filling out government forms. For their part, bureaucracies are producing increasingly legalistic and complicated documents and communications of many kinds that are incomprehensible to most people.

A "document request" by the chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee addressed to a nominee for the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., is a supreme example of "information overkill." It contains twelve sections with an average of ten or more subsections asking for an incredible list of documents, memoranda, correspondence, law cases and actions explaining and justifying a wide range of personal and organizational activities extending back more than five years. A final section lists eight Instructions and Definitions. The document request, published in its entirety in the Wall Street Journal, must be seen to be believed. It illustrates the extent to which bureaucratic complexity can be carried out by an overzealous and unrealistic staff: providing reason enough for the nominee either to refuse to reply to such a burdensome inquiry, or to withdraw his name from consideration if he is sufficiently disillusioned with government by such excess.

There is a momentum for all bureaucracies to grow, which must be taken into account by society. A few examples from the United States suffice to illustrate this trend. The combined staffs of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate have more than doubled during the past twenty years; "today's Congress is becoming a kind of bureaucracy itself." The White House staff of the president has grown from a core of 14 persons in 1945 to 568 people in 1989. The Pentagon--the world's largest office building--houses some 25,000 of the military and civilian staff employees of the U.S. Department of Defense who oversee the operations of over 2 million military personnel at the present time. An exceptional example of bureaucratic duplication occurred at a U.S. Army post during the Vietnam War when 22,000 Vietnamese were employed as support staff for 26,000 Americans who were themselves supposed to be support troops. Despite the avowed intentions of recent presidents and legislators to reduce the size of government, federal, state, and local bureaucracies continue to grow: to accommodate an increasing population, to serve special bureaucratic purposes as noted above, and in part because of the tendency to add more people in a period of expansion than are really needed.

Businesses expand for the same reasons except that purely political padding is less a factor, if it exists at all. Eventually, general economic conditions or direct competition force businesses to pare the "fat" that often results from the built-in momentum of growth. "The new chairman of the General Motors Corporation . . . said GM would try and remove layers of bureaucracy and give more decision-making power to lower-level workers."

For a number of reasons, civil governmental bureaucracies are the most prone to crippling inefficiencies. To begin with, as part of the sovereign body they have to do with a broader spectrum of human affairs, considerations, and responsibilities than other organizations in a society. Their operations are correspondingly difficult and complex, all the more since political factors are more directly, forcefully, and continually involved in civil government than in business and the military services. The civil governmental bureaucracy serves many purposes besides its critical role in the conduct of human affairs. It is often bigger than needed for efficient operations because it is used as a base of political power or patronage by the ruling authority: to award supporters for past actions and assure their future loyalty, support, noninterference, or vote. Government bureaucracies constitute an important block of votes in democracies and a political force in other systems of government that seek incumbent authority and to perpetuate themselves. Without a limiting force, governmental bureaucracies continue to grow simply because many people prefer employment that is relatively permanent and undemanding. Bureaucracies are also a form of protection against political replacement and the rapid and disconcerting change that is more likely to occur in other elements of the society. There is little motivation for organizational and individual improvement because there are few incentives to advance. Promotion correlates closely with the length of satisfactory service. The status quo is the desirable state of affairs. Whistleblowers are discouraged, disregarded as malcontents, or penalized as disloyal and untrustworthy. These are common characteristics of governmental bureaucracies as a whole, not indictments of those individuals within them who perform with professional competence and conscientiousness.

In some countries bureaucracies are a way of providing "full employment" if this is the political policy or constitutional requirement. The Soviet Union and East Germany, before the dissolution of one and reunification of the other with West Germany, revealed the vast size and stagnant incompetence that can be attained by governmental bureaucra cies. Their employees considered their jobs permanent and immune to challenge or change. Since the constitution of the People's Republic of China guarantees full employment, the government absorbs what the industrial and service sectors cannot. And in all three nations, the policy of overcentralized planning created oversize bureaucracies in a vain attempt to plan and direct industrial production and all other basic societal activities from their capitols: Moscow, East Berlin, and Beijing.

Every large organization is a bureaucracy in that it consists of a body of employees who perform its regular operations. They are the long-term personnel who carry out the established activities of the government, business, or military organization. "Their purpose is to stabilize and routinize operations so that they can be carried out regularly and consistently. Also, to act as brakes allowing time for the desirability and feasibility of proposed changes to be tested or for their gradual absorption into the bureaucratic system to take place without severe disruption." Major mistakes are minimized by successive review and actions conducted in accordance with formal procedures established gradually over the life of the organization. The knowledge concerning operations accumulated by bureaucrats over the years is passed on to their successors.

The term "bureaucracy" is associated today almost exclusively with government, disregarding the bureaucracies of business and those of the military services as distinct from civil government. Business and military organizations share most of the bureaucratic features of civil governmental bodies. But business bureaucracies functioning under capitalistic conditions are subject to competitive challenge in the commercial marketplace. Higher salaries and other forms of payment, bonuses, and stock options are probably greater incentives to self-improvement and better performance than government titles and military rank. Business also can relate advancement to sales or production quotas and other specific measures of performance not available in government. Perquisites and retirement benefits are available to both. Institutionally, government, business, and military bureaucracies have many more common characteristics than differences.

The decentralization of many of the manufacturing plants of the leading industrial nations to locations in other countries, and the internationalization of banking and finance, have greatly increased worldwide air travel by business and professional people. "In the zeal of even the most remote nations to attract tourist dollars, pounds, marks and francs, they have steadily depleted the number of untouched corners in the world."

The United States probably has the most mobile population in the world. On the average, the American family moves its place of residence every five years or so, most often within the same city or state. This poses a particular problem for local planning in a democracy. Local legislators must be alert to changes in their constituents' opinions and preferences as part of the residential population in their electoral district moves away and is replaced by new voters every year. And the United States receives more immigrants from more different countries than any other nation. Aircraft, automobiles, and railroads throughout the world carry hundreds of millions of passengers on personal and business trips every hour of every day. In general, the movement of people reduces cultural isolation but not necessarily personal loneliness. The more people travel, the less local and limited their outlook and the broader their awareness--if not necessarily their understanding--of how other people live and think. Triggered perhaps by its adoption years ago for commercial air traffic control by all nations, English has become the most common language for world intercommunication. When formalized in 1992, the European Community will no longer require passport presentation or visas among its members.

The international movement of people and goods imposes a severe burden of accommodation upon countries receiving large numbers of illegal immigrants. Illegal drugs, animal and plant diseases, harmful insects, and other damaging organisms are transported in greater quantity and more rapidly than ever before. "The zebra mussel may be one of the greatest biological invaders in North America, ranking up there with the gypsy moth and the starling. . . . The most spectacular example of a whole slew of introductions happening all over the world, the result of ballast water." Also, modern air transportation presents very vulnerable and tempting targets for terrorism. These developments constitute another set of problems requiring cooperative planning and action among nations, difficult to achieve under the most favorable circumstances.