Yes, this. Large bureaucracies tend to resemble each other for pretty understandable reasons. It doesn't much matter what the name of the organization is, nor whether it's governmental or private.
This is a typical feature of any bureaucracy, which basically describes every large power to some degree (some of which are more bureaucratic and others are less).
Interesting - but how come it does not even mention politics? The reason organizations get bureaucratic is because people make decisions that is in their own benefit, but not necessarily in the benefit of the organization.
Just want to add that many like to ridicule bureaucratic politics of (large) organizations. But in a way, bureaucracy is needed when a organization gets bigger.
The larger the organization, the more hamstrung it gets by its own bureaucracy. This applies to all large organizations - business, unions, government, religion. It's inevitable.
Not a lot of evidence presented to support the idea in the headline. My personal experience is that large organizations can be very, very effective. Bureaucracy works. That's why it exists. In my experience it is the medium-sized organizations that are aggravating: too large for their original ad hoc processes to be effective, too small to develop better ones.
This is a big problem with large bureaucracies. They can be inhumane. It's not good that we are forced more and more as individuals to be subservient to them.
> To a first, and second, and third approximation, bureaucracies are distributed computing systems; procedures, laws and bylaws are code, bureaucrats are the computing units.
Having spent a fair amount of time working in various bureaucracies, and studying law and government administration, that's very much not true. It's very much the idealized view that many people outside of bureaucracies have of them, especially people in computing, but it's very much not a good approximation of most real bureaucracies, or their governing law and regulation, because the latter usually is written in a way which deliberately relies heavily on discretion within (often deliberately fuzzy) constraints rather than seeking to provide deterministic rules for outcomes, and in many systems regulation is actually written by the bureaucrats enforcing it (who also tend to have disproportionate influence on shaping the actual law).
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