I am much more often surprised by what businesses do than by what the DMV does, and yet the DMV is one of the classic examples of a bureaucracy. At least for the limited purposes I’ve used them for, they’ve been extremely predictable.
Nor am I surprised by the IRS’s behavior, although I am “surprised” (in the sense of finding the decisions cynically nonsensical) about the way the United States IRS is funded, its tax code structured, and the fact that in the USA, everybody has to do their own taxes despite the fact that the IRS is also doing them. Yet these “surprising” features don’t originate within the IRS.
When we speak of the surprising “Bwuh?” behavior of bureaucracies, how do we distinguish this from bureaucracies that simply make mistakes, as all organizations, including businesses, do routinely? How do we distinguish “Bwuh?” from policy choices that we happen to disagree with? From incapacity? From failure?
Alternatively, if businesses don’t give you that “Bwuh?” reaction, and the key distinction between a business and a bureaucracy is that businesses have an overriding profit motive, then maybe what’s going on is that businesses are uniform and uncomplicated, so you’ve gotten used to them. Whereas with non-businesses, the heterogenous mixture of motives is just harder to parse.
I think that defining what precisely you mean by “bureaucracy” and what precisely you mean by this “Bwuh?” reaction would be helpful if you’re trying to pursue a more serious analysis going forward. We need general definitions, not just examples.
What is a bureaucracy? What is “Bwuh?”
I am much more often surprised by what businesses do than by what the DMV does, and yet the DMV is one of the classic examples of a bureaucracy. At least for the limited purposes I’ve used them for, they’ve been extremely predictable.
Nor am I surprised by the IRS’s behavior, although I am “surprised” (in the sense of finding the decisions cynically nonsensical) about the way the United States IRS is funded, its tax code structured, and the fact that in the USA, everybody has to do their own taxes despite the fact that the IRS is also doing them. Yet these “surprising” features don’t originate within the IRS.
When we speak of the surprising “Bwuh?” behavior of bureaucracies, how do we distinguish this from bureaucracies that simply make mistakes, as all organizations, including businesses, do routinely? How do we distinguish “Bwuh?” from policy choices that we happen to disagree with? From incapacity? From failure?
Alternatively, if businesses don’t give you that “Bwuh?” reaction, and the key distinction between a business and a bureaucracy is that businesses have an overriding profit motive, then maybe what’s going on is that businesses are uniform and uncomplicated, so you’ve gotten used to them. Whereas with non-businesses, the heterogenous mixture of motives is just harder to parse.
I think that defining what precisely you mean by “bureaucracy” and what precisely you mean by this “Bwuh?” reaction would be helpful if you’re trying to pursue a more serious analysis going forward. We need general definitions, not just examples.