A celebration of bureaucrats and bureaucracy. Whether in government, business, or non-profits, meetings, reports, meetings, conferences, reports, and meetings constitute daily life in a large organization.
After a hard day of bureaucratic work, you might enjoy a bed-time gothic thriller: A crime has been committed. The country has been robbed in one of the greatest ripoffs and dirty deals in modern industrial history. And in the commission of the crime, the nation’s largest and most socially minded corporation was defiled and … Continue reading COB-38: attacks on bureaucrats
Bureaucrats typically make whatever is done or said appear to result from tremendous effort and hours of discussion and deliberation. This appearance of ponderousness, stiffness, toil, and seriousness is not an end in itself. Merely subtracting from the attractiveness of life isn’t rational. Bureaucrats, who highly honor rationality, actually cultivate bureaucratic impressions in order to … Continue reading COB-37: bureaucratic graces
Nothing is more attractive than the grandeur that was Roman bureaucracy. Reading through the Roman Notitia Dignitatum will inspire any bureaucrat with longing to return to that spiritual home. In that holy land, the Master of Offices managed these organizations: the first school of shield-bearers, the second school of shield-bearers, the school of senior gentiles, … Continue reading COB-36: classical beauty
The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibition, 1934: A New Deal for Artists, captures well the challenges of bureaucratic work. In the midst of the Great Depression, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established the Public Works of Art Project. It was a pioneering project that enabled artists to become part of an important national bureaucracy. Paul … Continue reading COB-35: challenges of bureaucratic work
Recordkeeping is a core bureaucratic function. A recent scientific article, while cowardly eschewing the term bureaucracy, described these findings from economic experiments investigating recordkeeping: Recordkeeping improves memory of past interactions in a complex exchange environment, which promotes reputation formation and decision coordination. Economies with recordkeeping exhibit a beneficially altered economic history where the risks of … Continue reading COB-34: bureaucratic recordkeeping