Did a little research after church came up with some links and a scifi idea that might be interesting.
First a set of links to Mr. Pournelle's personal website and forum.
Main or home page.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/index.html
next this gives a overview of his website
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/whatis.html
now for the iron law theory in his own words.
http://www.jerrypournelle...reports/jerryp/iron.html
something I read years ago(1990's) and probably able to fuel another set of threads in the politics and other fun forum.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/voodoo.html
Below is a rather quickly collected group of links that came out of my attempt to cite some source, there were a large number of answers for companies, but none really seemed trust worthy.
I am curious just how long a bureaucracy goes on average before it starts to show signs of the "Iron Law", for me the signs would be the sudden explosion of paperwork and the sudden growth of people within the company not directly doing what the bureaucracy was set up to do. For example a police force who's bureaucracy has reached the stage where it has started to use a very high percentage of it's resources to hire additional employees, such as clerks and janitors that have nothing to do with directly enforcing the laws or in a budget pinch lays off police officers first instead of clerks and janitors.
I did a search for Bureaucracy with various words attached like lifespan, problems, efficiency and cycles and was surprised at how hot a potato the word was, it was making it hard to quickly find any useful information.
I decided to use something I remembered from the several economic textbooks I've read back in the 1980's and 1990's and looked up links for business life cycles instead and had much better list or at least less politically motivated list of links that aren't quite what I was wanting.
Most of the links below lead to short web pages with graphs and short discussions, but the last PDF is very large and I'm still working my way through it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w...rganizational_life_cycle
http://www.legacee.com/FastGrowth/OrgLifeCycle.html
http://www.inc.com/encycl...zational-life-cycle.html
http://books.google.com/b...ats.html?id=S63Mkn0LdK8C
http://www.lmmiller.com/a...nization-Life-Cycles.pdf
http://www.thesecondcycle.com/t2c/winning.php
http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/0472113178-ch1.pdf
I firmly believe that Mr. Pournelle's Iron Law is a fairly good theory of why Bureaucracy's can develop the way they do and why most Bureaucracy end up insane by human standards.
That said I also believe that Bureaucracies like politics are better than the alternatives assuming an alternative even exist for expanding an organization beyond what a single individual can handle.
Thinking about Cattynebulart's mentioning of the Roman empire Bureaucracy and my own mentioning of the long lived Chinese Bureaucracy perhaps the duration of a Bureaucracy isn't a good measure, after all the Iron Law mentions that any Bureaucracy is slowly taken over by the people most willing to advance within the Bureaucracy itself leaving those individuals that want to perform the actual task at a disadvantage.
If Mr. Pournelle's Iron Law is valid then it should be possible for steps to be taken that keep or at least slow down a Bureaucracy's fall into a internally focused self serving state.
Playing with this as a science fiction idea perhaps Bureaucracies should be considered a new life form that is a emergent property of the organization needed to run a large company or nation. I do know the Law for many purposes will treat companies as a person or a living being that is not the individuals that make up the corporation, perhaps the lawyers were seeing more than they realized.
I've heard politicians state that nations aren't individuals and shouldn't make national decision or set national policy like it is a individual. Perhaps the Bureaucratic insanity I mentioned isn't so insane if you consider the Bureaucracy a living organism, which has goals totally divorced from the original purpose of the nation or company that created the Bureaucracy.
CattyNebulart you mentioned UFO's that would make a good story idea, perhaps aliens arrive and they refuse to see humanity as individuals or even as a species instead they respond, speak and react not to humanity but to the Bureaucracies of humanity as if they were the life form worthy of interstellar contact..
hmelton
God Bless
First a set of links to Mr. Pournelle's personal website and forum.
Main or home page.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/index.html
next this gives a overview of his website
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/whatis.html
now for the iron law theory in his own words.
http://www.jerrypournelle...reports/jerryp/iron.html
something I read years ago(1990's) and probably able to fuel another set of threads in the politics and other fun forum.
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/voodoo.html
Below is a rather quickly collected group of links that came out of my attempt to cite some source, there were a large number of answers for companies, but none really seemed trust worthy.
I am curious just how long a bureaucracy goes on average before it starts to show signs of the "Iron Law", for me the signs would be the sudden explosion of paperwork and the sudden growth of people within the company not directly doing what the bureaucracy was set up to do. For example a police force who's bureaucracy has reached the stage where it has started to use a very high percentage of it's resources to hire additional employees, such as clerks and janitors that have nothing to do with directly enforcing the laws or in a budget pinch lays off police officers first instead of clerks and janitors.
I did a search for Bureaucracy with various words attached like lifespan, problems, efficiency and cycles and was surprised at how hot a potato the word was, it was making it hard to quickly find any useful information.
I decided to use something I remembered from the several economic textbooks I've read back in the 1980's and 1990's and looked up links for business life cycles instead and had much better list or at least less politically motivated list of links that aren't quite what I was wanting.
Most of the links below lead to short web pages with graphs and short discussions, but the last PDF is very large and I'm still working my way through it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w...rganizational_life_cycle
http://www.legacee.com/FastGrowth/OrgLifeCycle.html
http://www.inc.com/encycl...zational-life-cycle.html
http://books.google.com/b...ats.html?id=S63Mkn0LdK8C
http://www.lmmiller.com/a...nization-Life-Cycles.pdf
http://www.thesecondcycle.com/t2c/winning.php
http://www.press.umich.edu/pdf/0472113178-ch1.pdf
I firmly believe that Mr. Pournelle's Iron Law is a fairly good theory of why Bureaucracy's can develop the way they do and why most Bureaucracy end up insane by human standards.
That said I also believe that Bureaucracies like politics are better than the alternatives assuming an alternative even exist for expanding an organization beyond what a single individual can handle.
Thinking about Cattynebulart's mentioning of the Roman empire Bureaucracy and my own mentioning of the long lived Chinese Bureaucracy perhaps the duration of a Bureaucracy isn't a good measure, after all the Iron Law mentions that any Bureaucracy is slowly taken over by the people most willing to advance within the Bureaucracy itself leaving those individuals that want to perform the actual task at a disadvantage.
If Mr. Pournelle's Iron Law is valid then it should be possible for steps to be taken that keep or at least slow down a Bureaucracy's fall into a internally focused self serving state.
Playing with this as a science fiction idea perhaps Bureaucracies should be considered a new life form that is a emergent property of the organization needed to run a large company or nation. I do know the Law for many purposes will treat companies as a person or a living being that is not the individuals that make up the corporation, perhaps the lawyers were seeing more than they realized.
I've heard politicians state that nations aren't individuals and shouldn't make national decision or set national policy like it is a individual. Perhaps the Bureaucratic insanity I mentioned isn't so insane if you consider the Bureaucracy a living organism, which has goals totally divorced from the original purpose of the nation or company that created the Bureaucracy.
CattyNebulart you mentioned UFO's that would make a good story idea, perhaps aliens arrive and they refuse to see humanity as individuals or even as a species instead they respond, speak and react not to humanity but to the Bureaucracies of humanity as if they were the life form worthy of interstellar contact..
hmelton
God Bless