Especially, after just having read The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy by David Graeber, I feel that most bureaucracy we have is very bad and might create more harm then benefits.
At the same time there are needs for bureaucracy. At Wikidata I care for it’s functioning and it seems that some bureaucracy is needed to make norms legible for new users and also do reduce the necessity to waste time by having certain conflicts not resolved and refought over and over.
While Wikimedia projects are in some sense different then other organizations, it’s likely that studies of other bureaucratic structures might provide valuable knowledge.
Is there any reading you can recommend?
The field of mechanism design seems very relevant here.