by Stephen Carter

Created on: September 15, 2007

The affects of bureaucracy are primarily more to be considered disadvantages than advantages.

First, a bureaucracy theoretically provides a service, but the the profit motive is removed from this process. This inevitably results in inefficiency within the bureaucratic organization, at first chronic, then unsustainable, then ruinous. This occurs partially because of the misallocation of resources, based on rationales that are random, non-economic, often ideological, and often entirely unrelated to the task at hand.

As a bureaucracy ages its primary functional objective becomes its own survival, long after the original objective for its creation has been fulfilled, or is effectively being provided by cheaper, faster, more efficient private organizations.

It is in these final stages that a bureaucracy becomes a negative, destructive force in society, working openly against public welfare. The best example of such a contemporary Potemkin bureaucracy is the United Nations, where the majority of the organization's activities are avowedly, nakedly ideological, that is it's opposed to the global political and economic status quo (on which its survival, ironically, largely rests) and works actively to subvert it.

There is a considerable lag period until the self-evidently subversive and destructive nature of a bureaucracy overcomes popular inertia. Social forces do strongly favor such an organization's continued persistence long after its useful service has ended.

To summarize briefly, it can be argued that bureaucracies do fail on many fronts. They monopolize discursive space (limiting public debate on their areas of 'expertise'); they waste resources (tax revenue); they embrace revolutionary ideologies; they distrust the democratic impulse; they often act as though they are above the law; they fail even to provide their original service; they eventually subvert the society's values in which they operate.

I would argue the main advantage of a bureaucracy is that its clear, unequivocal level of deterioration (as with the UN, for example) alerts intelligent observers to the clear fact that a structural weakness has emerged in society (of which the bureaucracy is but a symptom).

So, the UN's advanced level of deterioration (i.e. endemic corruption, its working 'against' human rights protection, its giving 'cover' to repressive regimes, its hostility to democratic principles) serves as a leading indicator that the broad framework of post-World War II global administrative institutions is no longer fulfilling its original mission.

This is a considerable advantage. A bureaucracy's very decomposition is a warning sign that a new response to the original problems has become necessary.

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