I suspect that bureaucracy would be present in alien worlds, so long as the aliens aren’t able to perfectly communicate with each other.
When one person is working on their own, they can just do whatever they think accomplishes their goal best. (Modulo how humans are not rational on an individual level.) Once you have two people working together though, they’ll start to have disagreements. Perhaps the two can work out their disagreements directly, but once you start to have more, the disagreements need mediators to resolve. Even in small companies, huge amounts of bureaucracy are introduced to guide people or to insulate people.
A bureaucracy can’t be tightly coupled because the primary purpose of it is to decrease coupling between the people subjected to it. Imagine a group of chefs are designing the next Poptart flavor. One chef thinks that it should be grape while another thinks it should be watermelon and a third thinks that peanut butter is best. Like in many situations, the three options are about equal and each has their pros and cons. The watermelon chef has a child with a peanut allergy. The grape chef doesn’t think that watermelons are tasty. The peanut butter chef thinks that grapes will taste too much like cough syrup. All three would probably affect the bottom line of the company equally, but they still need to choose one. Bureaucracy gives them each plausible deniability by introducing arbitrary rules that allow them to decide on a flavor without making it personal. Pergaps the company has a rule to not sell any products with allergens and all products have to meet a minimum bar of flavor to get made, so they go with grape. Maybe the grape poptart will be really unpopular though because of it’s cough syrup flavor and next time they’ll use a rule of “no foods that taste like medicine.”
Once you reach a group size of millions or billions of people, coordinating it without causing strife between individuals is difficult (or likely impossible), but we still want to do the best we can. So the FDA says “we need to take our time studying this drug” because that’s what they’ve said in the past, and it’s done a good-enough job in the past at keeping all the different parties happy and not fighting each other.
One downside to this is that it breaks in situations that are new or intense. The CDC did a good job with past epidemics but when they applied the same rules to a new pandemic, many of the rules no longer worked. Another downside is that the rules don’t inherently care about fairness, only about satisficing the relevant parties. The ancien regime worked well for France (or at least, the people the French bureaucracy cared about) until the bourgeoisie and the peasantry become relevant.
That is all to say, bureaucracy exists as a satisficer, primarily guarding unknown Chesteron’s Fences and preventing individuals from making unilateral decisions that affect everyone else.
I suspect that bureaucracy would be present in alien worlds, so long as the aliens aren’t able to perfectly communicate with each other.
When one person is working on their own, they can just do whatever they think accomplishes their goal best. (Modulo how humans are not rational on an individual level.) Once you have two people working together though, they’ll start to have disagreements. Perhaps the two can work out their disagreements directly, but once you start to have more, the disagreements need mediators to resolve. Even in small companies, huge amounts of bureaucracy are introduced to guide people or to insulate people.
A bureaucracy can’t be tightly coupled because the primary purpose of it is to decrease coupling between the people subjected to it. Imagine a group of chefs are designing the next Poptart flavor. One chef thinks that it should be grape while another thinks it should be watermelon and a third thinks that peanut butter is best. Like in many situations, the three options are about equal and each has their pros and cons. The watermelon chef has a child with a peanut allergy. The grape chef doesn’t think that watermelons are tasty. The peanut butter chef thinks that grapes will taste too much like cough syrup. All three would probably affect the bottom line of the company equally, but they still need to choose one. Bureaucracy gives them each plausible deniability by introducing arbitrary rules that allow them to decide on a flavor without making it personal. Pergaps the company has a rule to not sell any products with allergens and all products have to meet a minimum bar of flavor to get made, so they go with grape. Maybe the grape poptart will be really unpopular though because of it’s cough syrup flavor and next time they’ll use a rule of “no foods that taste like medicine.”
Once you reach a group size of millions or billions of people, coordinating it without causing strife between individuals is difficult (or likely impossible), but we still want to do the best we can. So the FDA says “we need to take our time studying this drug” because that’s what they’ve said in the past, and it’s done a good-enough job in the past at keeping all the different parties happy and not fighting each other.
One downside to this is that it breaks in situations that are new or intense. The CDC did a good job with past epidemics but when they applied the same rules to a new pandemic, many of the rules no longer worked. Another downside is that the rules don’t inherently care about fairness, only about satisficing the relevant parties. The ancien regime worked well for France (or at least, the people the French bureaucracy cared about) until the bourgeoisie and the peasantry become relevant.
That is all to say, bureaucracy exists as a satisficer, primarily guarding unknown Chesteron’s Fences and preventing individuals from making unilateral decisions that affect everyone else.