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EDITORIAL
When Bureaucracy Backfires
Because criticizing bureaucracy has become something of a national sport, I will start by defending it.
As a system of rules that defines and regulates administrative processes, bureaucracy plays a crucial role in shaping organizations into institutions. In fact, we rely on it to ensure that groups of people act in an organized and coordinated way, regardless of who occupies each position, and regardless of who enforces the rules, giving institutions their efficient, predictable, and enduring nature.
Unfortunately, we also know that unless a good balance is found between the regulatory system and the processes it governs, bureaucracy becomes a major source of inefficiency whenever more time and effort are required to comply with administrative rules than to do the technical work itself. Furthermore, although we once expected that the widespread adoption of information-sharing and processing technologies would help improve this balance, experience has shown that this hope was overly optimistic.
In fact, there is now a growing sense that the computerization of public administration has increased the bureaucratic burden. In academia, this was first felt in our teaching duties and is now rapidly spreading to research. Indeed, ever-increasing bureaucratic demands are placed on both researchers and research institutions. Today, we see a rapid increase in reporting requirements and expenditure justifications, as if bureaucracy needed to feed itself, or as if funding agencies viewed academics as a bunch of crooks until proven otherwise. And if that were not enough, while bureaucratic workload continues to rise, the funding overheads made available to cover the associated administrative effort continue to decline.
One day, when this inevitably demotivates researchers and suffocates research institutions, please don’t say we didn’t see it coming.
José Carlos Pedro
(IT President)
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