I appreciate the response. I poked around a bit looking for an online version of the two works and haven’t found one yet, but will continue looking a bit and look forward to your eventual summary of those points.
(My own motivation for curating this stemmed from having observed a couple bureaucracies forming in realtime over the past year, which did roughly match the “owned by the creator” schema here, as well as encountering various other bureaucracies that seemed to match the “un-owned” schema, which were pathological in the ways you’d expect and that matched the model in the post. The assumption I took as given in this post, although not specified, is that most bureaucracies you encounter will be un-owned)
I think that most bureaucracies are the inevitable result of growth, and even when they were initially owned by the creator, they don’t act that way once they require more than a few people. (See my Ribbonfarm Post, Go Corporate or Go Home)
Comparing the goals of a bureaucracy with the incentives and the organizational style, you should expect to find a large degree of overlap for small bureaucracies, trailing off, at best, around a dozen people, but almost none for larger ones. This isn’t a function of time since formation, but rather a function of size—larger bureaucracies are fundamentally less responsive to owner’s intent or control, and more about structure and organizational priorities. As an obvious case study, look at what happened at US DHS after 2002, which was created de novo with a clear goal, but it is clear in retrospect that the goal was immediately irrelevant to how the bureaucracy worked.
This all makes sense, just doesn’t seem to me to be in conflict with the OP.
I don’t know much about the US DHS, but a few obvious things that pop into mind:
In the schema of the OP, a large bureaucracy is harder to make an effective bureaucracy (for the same reason a large codebase is more likely to have bugs). Especially if that bureaucracy was created quickly. Even if it has a competent owner, it’s just a harder task.
The DHS wasn’t created in a vacuum, it was created a) as part of a weird political situation, b) I suspect it was also to some extent created by existing bureaucracies. I have little reason to believe that the stated goal of the DHS was ever the actual goal. I don’t think it “got immediately compromised”, my guess is it was compromised from conception. (But, I don’t know a whole lot about it and wouldn’t be that surprised if my guesses were off)
Something that the OP doesn’t delve into much (and I do think makes it incomplete) is that bureaucracies might have multiple owners.
Just like a codebase is more likely to run into problems if it’s being created by multiple teams with multiple goals, esp. if those people aren’t aligned with each other, it’d make sense for bureaucracy goals to have degrees of coherence, depending on whether they were created by a single person or as part of political compromise.
I appreciate the response. I poked around a bit looking for an online version of the two works and haven’t found one yet, but will continue looking a bit and look forward to your eventual summary of those points.
(My own motivation for curating this stemmed from having observed a couple bureaucracies forming in realtime over the past year, which did roughly match the “owned by the creator” schema here, as well as encountering various other bureaucracies that seemed to match the “un-owned” schema, which were pathological in the ways you’d expect and that matched the model in the post. The assumption I took as given in this post, although not specified, is that most bureaucracies you encounter will be un-owned)
I think that most bureaucracies are the inevitable result of growth, and even when they were initially owned by the creator, they don’t act that way once they require more than a few people. (See my Ribbonfarm Post, Go Corporate or Go Home)
Comparing the goals of a bureaucracy with the incentives and the organizational style, you should expect to find a large degree of overlap for small bureaucracies, trailing off, at best, around a dozen people, but almost none for larger ones. This isn’t a function of time since formation, but rather a function of size—larger bureaucracies are fundamentally less responsive to owner’s intent or control, and more about structure and organizational priorities. As an obvious case study, look at what happened at US DHS after 2002, which was created de novo with a clear goal, but it is clear in retrospect that the goal was immediately irrelevant to how the bureaucracy worked.
This all makes sense, just doesn’t seem to me to be in conflict with the OP.
I don’t know much about the US DHS, but a few obvious things that pop into mind:
In the schema of the OP, a large bureaucracy is harder to make an effective bureaucracy (for the same reason a large codebase is more likely to have bugs). Especially if that bureaucracy was created quickly. Even if it has a competent owner, it’s just a harder task.
The DHS wasn’t created in a vacuum, it was created a) as part of a weird political situation, b) I suspect it was also to some extent created by existing bureaucracies. I have little reason to believe that the stated goal of the DHS was ever the actual goal. I don’t think it “got immediately compromised”, my guess is it was compromised from conception. (But, I don’t know a whole lot about it and wouldn’t be that surprised if my guesses were off)
Something that the OP doesn’t delve into much (and I do think makes it incomplete) is that bureaucracies might have multiple owners.
Just like a codebase is more likely to run into problems if it’s being created by multiple teams with multiple goals, esp. if those people aren’t aligned with each other, it’d make sense for bureaucracy goals to have degrees of coherence, depending on whether they were created by a single person or as part of political compromise.