US Bureaucracy

NOTES ON THE US BUREAUCRACY

Like any organisation the workings of the US bureaucracy during this time were influenced by dynamics relating to various internal rationales, customs, practices, and cultures that had emerged earlier. Although nebulous and difficult to fully apprehend 60 years beyond the period that concerns us, it is likely that the cultures and practices of the US bureaucracy also played a part in the events outlined in Randolph Paul's report.

The US bureaucracy has been based on the principles of 'scientific management' since the 1910s when 'scientific management' began to be expounded and promoted by influential figures such as Woodrow Wilson and the sociologist Max Weber.

In this regard the US bureaucracy is no different from those of other western industrial bureaucracies.

With its basis in human rationality and empiricism the US bureaucracy is a classic product of western industrial modernity.

Its pervasive operating faith is that all problems can be objectively understood and their solutions can be rationally identified and carried out. Problems should only be identified within the 'unbiased', 'uncorrupted' sphere of rationality. The right solution is the rational solution, usually determined in part by precedent and balance sheet type cost benefit analyses.

In Legitimacy and Public Administration O. Mc Suite observed that this valorisation of rationality can lead to bureaucracies contradicting and undermining the principles of liberalism and justice, at least in theory, at the core of the government of the capitalist democracies they have been developed to serve (p275).

Technological developments had resulted in and continued to produce a burgeoning of information and problems coming to the attention of modern governments.

Coming at the time when most professions were splitting into specialisations in response to these technological developments and their consequences, the bureaucracy used this template and split into rational specialisations. In practice this meant fragmentation within government departments rather than between departments.

Apart from departmental heads each person's role and authority came to involve a diminishing range of their department's activities. Rewards and punishments in the forms of promotions and the like have generally kept people on their own departmental turf.

Generally this results in cultures that tend to be narrowly focussed, selectively attentive, and resistant to new tasks or methods. A major consequence of these cultures practices is the creation of environments that are fertile grounds for group-think, sealed off from scrutiny and necessary corrective feedback.

Characteristic of Western bureaucracies, their rigid hierarchical structures exacerbate this. Obedience to this structure reinforced through professional rewards and punishments keeps people focussed within the ranges defined for them.

Political language also contributes to these dynamics.

In the State Department, where goals and functions at all levels are vague, abstract and frequently meaningless in concrete situations, workers are particularly vulnerable to these forces. In the absence of unambiguous goals and instructions workers will act according to the incentives valued by those further up the hierarchy and pressures imposed by clients. In his study of US government agencies James Wilson found that professional norms inculcated in the workplace furnish workers with a knowledge of these incentives and encourage conformity and caution.

These factors may all help explain the following findings of two studies of US bureaucratic behaviour:

Examining all US government departments in 1969 Gawthorp stated:

" only limited rewards are available to career bureaucrats who demonstrate a capacity and a willingness for innovative behaviour. On the other hand, substantial rewards are generally available to the executive administrative administrator who chooses to respond faithfully to the expressed needs of his clientele and congressional groups "

From Donald Warwick in collaboration with Marvin Meade and Theodore Reed, A Theory of Public Bureaucracy Politics, Personality, and Organisation in the State Department, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1975, 102.

The US State Department's report Diplomacy in the 1970's found that State Department officers typically thought that:
" conformity ... is rewarded above all"

One State Department officer stated :
" The pressures... to avoid expression of controversial views are of the subtle, unspoken kind which are hard to document"

From Donald Warwick et al, p105.

Given the lack of evidence to the contrary it would be remiss not to consider that these dynamics were also at play in the US bureaucracy of 1943.