For older Americans who claim that the modern generation doesn’t do much besides shuffling paper, “More of Us Are Working in Big Bureaucratic Organizations than Ever Before” (Harvard Business Review) has some choice passages:
Between 1983 and 2014, the number of managers, supervisors and support staff in the U.S. workforce grew by 90%, while employment in other occupations grew by less than 40%. A similar trend can be found in other OECD countries. In the United Kingdom, for example, the employment share of managers and supervisors increased from 12.9% in 2001 to 16% in 2015.
In some sectors, like health care and higher education, the bureaucratic class has grown even faster. In the University of California’s sprawling network, the number of managers and administrators doubled between 2000 and 2015, while student enrollment increased by just 38%. At present, there are 1.2 administrators for every tenured or tenure-track faculty member within the UC system.
Yet our research suggests that bureaucracy is not inevitable; it’s not the inescapable price of doing business in a complicated world. Rather, it’s a cancer that eats away at economic productivity and organizational resilience.
From “useless” to “cancer”…
Related:
The British Army has more generals than tanks.
Could it be that this is merely a side-effect of increasing automation in life and work?
Traditionally manual tasks are replaced by automation, so society (perhaps unconsciously) simply finds other things for mankind to do rather than die off. Hence, an increase in what seems to be illogical work for the sake of work.
And why not? Could one even automate a bureaucracy without effectively nullifying it? Who would approve such a project? Certainly not the bureaucrats, the same people who are usually charged with approving projects in any business concern.
Perhaps the niche which is safe from current automation methodologies–which falls through its cracks–is management. And maybe one day, when someone finds a way to automate/nullify said bureaucracy, society will find some other means to keep people employed by falling through its cracks, and we’ll see a sharp rise in other sectors or professions.
In the last 100 years, we probably saw a sharp rise in the manufacturing workforce as there were now all sorts of new metal & plastic things to build; now that machines are doing the work, why shouldn’t we see an increase in management-type work?
We logically think mankind can’t justify its existence by pushing paper back & forth, but why should mankind justify its existence by making the cars, gadgets, etc. that we think have constituted legitimate industry for the last 100 yrs.? Mankind certainly didn’t need that stuff for its prior 10k yrs.
Time to re-read Parkinson’s Law.