The Bureaucratic Mind Revisited

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 Reining in creativity by “regularizing” work simplifies organizational life, but has a deadening effect on innovators.

In a debate on the explosion of American lawsuits a few years ago the famed law professor and trial lawyer Alan Dershowitz described one litigation strategy used by large corporate defendants as “papering the other side to death.” He meant, of course, that a lawyered-up organization can intimidate a plaintiff  by requiring so much data and information that the cost of a “win” becomes too time-consuming.

The phrase has always stuck with me as a perfect representation of a common bureaucratic impulse. Paper has perhaps been replaced by online documents and files.  Even so, there seems to be a natural tendency to bureaucratize even the simplest processes, ostensibly to be “uniform.”  In fact rules have always functioned in part to mystify others into compliance. No one, for example, reads the “conditions of use” fine-print attached to nearly every downloaded application.  But the sheer volume of their legalese lends authority to the source. Or try having your car or yourself serviced at a facility that is supposed to assure us to keep things in good working order. The front desk clerk taking down your information is now likely to go through a prolonged data-entry mode that leaves little time for a description of the problem that brought you in.

Rule-makers are  ready to see any free choice as a vacuum that needs a procedure.

Our organizational life seems to thrive on hiring and promoting rule-makers: policy specialists, compliance officers, lawyers, professional writers, contract law specialists, employees charged with reviewing procedures, and especially organizational members–some with OCD tendencies that make them ready to see any free choice as a vacuum that needs a procedure. After all, someone must police the miscreants who would initiate a novel approach to a routine task.

“Procedures” nailed down in multiple pages of “steps” have the perverse effect of replacing individual initiative with a gloss of uniformity.  Organizational culture naturally wants conformity, which is not always a bad thing. The problem is that the folks who write the rules seem to self-select, forming groups who are all too willing to bury the rest of us in paper.

Alas, this compulsion toward overwrought rule-making has not produced a comparable group of  specialists motivated to reverse the process. So organizational culture typically embraces a snowballing accumulation of stifling regulations.  What was once left to individual initiative often ends up as formal procedure.

In the field I know the urge to lay down mandatory “guidelines” cannot help but sap the energy of even the most creative teachers. The pedant in all of us loves to make guidelines, rubrics, checklists, worksheets, performance reviews, reviews of performance reviews, minimum standards, mission statements, instructions, directives, monthly reports, yearly updates, checklists, and criteria. People who might better spend their time on creative new scholarship often drift into generating handbooks of rules for even the most simple of professional tasks, such as observing a younger colleague’s teaching. The arc of a college teacher’s professional career is now tracked, classified, quantified, compared against a rubric, assessed by insiders, assessed by outsiders, tested in online questionnaires, burdened with filings to outside agencies, and itemized in reports to higher-ups.  As a visiting professor at a small British college years ago I couldn’t teach what they did not already offer because, well, they didn’t offer it.  It was not in the approved curriculum set up by a committee at another university.  That can be true everywhere, especially if a university program has bought into a “certification” process that lays out uniform standards.

The rhetorician Kenneth Burke called this tendency to create regulatory flotsam “the bureaucratization of the imaginative.” It’s a perfect phrase. Reining in creativity by “regularizing” work simplifies organizational life, but has a deadening effect on innovators. In effect, the rhetoric of rules places a heavy burden on the most creative among us. Too often this impulse leads to the measurement of success in terms of compliance rather than initiative.  And compliance is often a very low bar.

The First Amendment

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                                                                    commons wikimedia

The idea of a “bulwark against tyranny” is probably an overused phrase.  But it applies perfectly to the First Amendment, the core American canon that may be our best export.  

These are days Americans are scrambling to remember the school civics lesson that explained rights of advocacy guaranteed by the Constitution.  In those classes long ago the Amendment probably registered as just another academic exercise. But the present instability of the Presidency requires that we be awake and pay heed to its words.  As students we were assured that The Amendment ratified in 1791 was our birthright.  We may need to test that promise.

The wording is brief but empowering.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Even as non-experts we can still understand the broad outlines of the Amendment’s five overlapping guarantees:

  • We have the right to be practice a religious tradition or not.  With few exceptions pertaining to a church’s tax status, the “Establishment Clause” and its related “Free exercise” clause means there can be no imposition of state or federal laws that would require or limit religious practice.  Action by the President to circumscribe the rights of Muslim residents or visitors thus offends one of  the most honored principles in the American project.
  • We have the right to say and print what we wish, though where we exercise these rights can be altered by public safety concerns and limits on trespassing.  Most protests in cities and towns, for example, require notification of the police and permitting. In the workplace expressing political attitudes at work breaks no laws.  But those views can still get you fired.
  •  Freedom of association and a assembly is a basic right. And though an elected official retains the power to determine how and when, we have the right of “petition:” to meet with elected officials or their representatives. Town hall meetings or visits to the office of a member of Congress are not gifts from the member, but a constituent’s right.
  • In light of the President’s reprehensible description of the media as the “enemy of the people,” the guarantee of a free  press has added importance.  The press is the only form of business given constitutional protections, and the license from the Amendment is broad.  Media outlets are given leeway to “publish”  not just accurate information, but misinformation and hostile judgments of others. As it should be–and unlike the United Kingdom–libel is difficult to prove in American courts.  In practice, the greatest protections of speaking and writing go to artists and journalists portraying the work of public figures.

We actually honor the First Amendment by tolerating speech and published material at the margins, including–in many cases–communications that on other grounds are repellant and uninformed.  There is irony that our most cherished national value is frequently paired with words and actions most of us could not endorse.  But it’s enough to tolerate the authors of sometimes ill-considered ideas.   Protecting them protects us all.

The idea of a “bulwark against tyranny” is probably an overused phrase.  But it applies perfectly to the First Amendment, the core American canon that may be our best export.