I’ve googled it and I’ve read the definition but I still have no idea what it actually is and how it affects a person, particularly in their day to day lives
In: Other
The formal definition of a bureaucracy is a government where decisions are made by “the state” instead of the people or representatives of the people. But nobody uses bureaucracy that way.
Whenever people use the word bureaucracy, it’s almost always in one of two ways:
1) you encounter a situation where a process or organization is seemingly way too complicated or contains way too many approval steps than seem to be required by common sense
2) you encounter a situation where two people in the same organization or two steps in an approval process give you directions that seem to be the exact opposite of each other — that one side doesn’t seem to know what the other side is doing
When organizations get large, jobs become more specialized (vs. startups where everyone works on everything). When jobs become specialized, it’s easy for each job to become disconnected from what other jobs are doing. This creates the bureaucracy that most people experience.
Bureaucracy is a system of rules that are usually very inflexible, time-consuming, and inefficient. These rules probably made sense when first written, but will have been added to over time again and again, and now don’t really make sense, but you *have* to do it that way because that’s the way it’s always been done.
For example. I could have simply answered your question as I did above, or I could have taken a very bureaucratic approach and replied that while I do know the answer to your question…
In order for me to answer your question, you have to submit an official request in writing (3 hand written copies of form number ELI-5) along with a copy of your birth certificate, passport, or driving licence that has been certified as genuine by a solicitor and dated within the last calendar month. On receipt of your application I will write back to confirm receipt and that I will respond to you fully in writing before the end of the next calendar month.
Rules. That’s it.
Imagine a world with no rules. People could drive on your yard, walk into your house, take food from the grocery, literally anything?
So in order to build a polite society where we can all get along, people came up with some rules. Don’t take my stuff, let’s all drive on the same side of the road, etc.
You keep growing that idea until you have a government, and teams of people dedicated to making those rules, and other teams to enforce those rules, then other groups to change the rules!
Sit still in class and learn! Rules!
It’s… hard to apply it to everyday life. For a bureaucracy to exist, you need a LOT of people.
Oversimplified, it’s a system with “tiers” of leadership. Lots of companies are set up this way. At the “top” there are people who are the “big bosses” and they make decisions about how the company runs. There are “smaller bosses” underneath them responsible for *parts* of the company. Their job is to try and make their part of the company do what the “big bosses” say. At the very bottom are the workers, who have to do an individual job to contribute to the overall goals.
A worker may see something that’s waste and could save the company money. But they can’t just order new machinery or change the process themselves, they have to work within the bureaucracy. So they have to tell their manager, and THAT manager also might not have the power to change things, so they have to tell THEIR manager. Eventually a manager who can make the change is notified and makes the change.
That’s obviously slow, so why bother? Well, there may be big picture reasons the process was wasteful. Some of the bigger bosses may be planning to change that part of the business soon, so fixing the wasteful process won’t save enough money before the change to be worth paying to fix it. The employees at the “lower” levels may not know about those plans so if they’re able to make big decisions without oversight they could really screw things up. To some extent having a bureaucracy helps everyone focus on the smallest job they need to do and helps everyone stay aligned.
But it’s really hard to get it right, and if everyone in the bureaucracy makes little mistakes all of those mistakes add up. That’s why we make fun of them and think they’re problematic. But, at the same time, if you tried to run a company like Amazon using the same rules that work for a company with 6 people, it’d be chaos.
How’s it affect you day to day? Well, that only matters if there’s some law you really really need passed. Like, suppose you’re going to die if you can’t get a medical procedure done, but it’s currently illegal in your state. In my state, the bureaucracy is set up such that the people who could change the law aren’t going to meet again until later next year, so there’s absolutely nothing you can do but hope you don’t die until then. (By the way, it’s also illegal for you to get it done in another state.)
There’s lots of other little effects. Like how the US pays more money for healthcare per citizen than any other developed nation but is only in about the middle of the pack when it comes to quality of healthcare. We started trying to reform it way back in 2010. That took years of work. Then the next President was so mad about it he said he’d write something completely new that would be better, but it turned out to be too hard and he gave up because none of the plans his people came up with even got sympathy votes. It’s 14 years later, all of the problems are worse, and the only thing we’ve *barely* accomplished is putting some price caps on insulin for *some* people. Even that is getting eaten up in bureaucracy because people who care more about winning political points than governing the nation file lawsuits or try to pass new laws to remove it. That takes up time in courts and Congress that could be spent on handling other problems.
So it’s really indirect. If you want the government or a company to do something to help you, it’s going to take a LONG time and a LOT of work to get it. That’s bureaucracy. A lot of people hate it. There are governments that don’t have so much bureaucracy and they can make decisions fast. But, unfortunately, those governments tend to make decisions without concern as to whether it hurts people. The two extremes are:
* With bureaucracy: “We can’t build this railroad system that would be good for the state. There are too many people who have houses we will have to demolish. We’re going to have to pay all of those people to move to be fair, and that also means we’re going to have to do extra work to prove there’s no better alternative that DOESN’T involve demolishing their home. That process alone will probably take five years, and by then this railroad plan may not even be what we need. Also there’s the problem of who will demolish the homes, we’re going to have to hold a bidding process…”
* With no bureaucracy: “We’re going to build this railroad. What? There’s a house in the way? I don’t care. Tell them to move. I want the site cleared by the end of the week, and I don’t care if they’re in the house when you bulldoze it. Tell them to sue me. I’ll put them in jail. Then they’ll have plenty of house.”
In government it’s meant to be for “fairness”, but there are always people who are good at tilting “fair” to mean “I get the best deal”.
To over simplify, it just refers to process controls.
If my company gives you 1mil/yr to further my interests, I would have little means of knowing if you’re misallocating some of it to further your interests instead.
That’s where bureaucracy comes in. I create a structured system with checks and balances to make sure you’re using those funds appropriately. I make you submit a proposal for each project. I review this with my board and get their opinions. If we approve, we send you a document that outlines what was approved and by whom.
This creates a paper trail so people, in theory, can be held accountable for their decisions and to make sure they’re following the rules.
That’s bureaucracy.
Sometimes bureaucracy can go a bit too far trying to keep things under control such that the beurocracy itself starts preventing processes from proceeding to completion, or may accidentally create infinite loops in workflows. This is usually what people are talking about when they complain about beurocracy in government, but not always.
I could give you a better example of beurocracy going too far, but first I will need you to submit a form confirming you have read and understood this comment, with a form of legal identity and your birth certificate. After a holding period of a week for proper review, I will send you another form where you will consent to read my next comment and indicate how you intend to use the information. You will then submit that to me, and I will engage an outside party to validate the information transaction before proceeding. The process should take about 4 weeks.
Hope this helps.
The basic idea of a bureaucracy is that power should be divided up into neat little organizations, or “bureaus,” (like the drawers of a desk), with each bureau able to operate as independently as possible. Ideally, that makes it clear which organizations have what authority without overlap or ambiguity. For the US government, do you have a tax issue? Talk to the IRS. Question about who’s allowed to do what with a natural resource? Department of the Interior.
The potential upside is that you don’t have internal conflicts over who gets to make what decisions, because power is neatly divided into these separate bureaus. And even if one bureau has internal issues, the other bureaus can hopefully operate independently. Whatever might be happening with the IRS’s chain of command on a given day, the post office can keep delivering mail.
The potential downside is that for any issues that span multiple bureaus, those bureaus may end up bouncing the problem between each other, or have issues coordinating approval for something. Each bureau might try to foist you off onto the bureau whose issue they think it is, or require you to each go through their own very specific process for gain approval. This can create added complexity or deadlocks that otherwise might not exist.
Latest Answers