In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on July 15, 2009

If there is one thing bureaucracies, as collectives, cannot stand, it is the free flow of information.  This observation was just reinforced when I got an email from a friend who told me that his organization just blocked out a site I had built for him because the host (sites.google) had too many phishing sites.

Developing bureaucracies

One of the things I remember from taking a course in Labour Process (LP) theory was a statement made by my prof that the theory was more important than the facts.  It was one of those WTF?!? moments when he proceeded to tell me that LP theory was based on the idea that the assembly line and interchangeable parts were an invention of the Industrial Revolution.  Now, as anyone who has read any Sumerian archaeology knows, that is a load of horse pucky; we have solid, archaeological evidence for the mass production of interchangeable parts over 4000 years ago in Lagash, Ur, Uruk, etc. This (re-)started me thinking about how bureaucracies use information.

Bureaucracies first appear to have developed about 8-10,000 years ago in the ancient Near East (source).  Indeed, they are probably the result of one of the first, if not the first, clear instance of social stratification based on position rather than ability.  This position was that of “recorder” or “record keeper”; initially, the person in a community who kept a record of each person’s work in the fields and community so that they could have a fair share of the collective harvest.

By the mid-4th millenia bce, bureaucrats controlled the Sumerian cities  in a style that modern bureaucrats would, if possible, love to emulate (the entire population were slaves of the God or Goddess who owned the city, and the bureaucrats were their “priesthood”).  In these cities, at least by the time we start to have written records (and writing was an invention of bureaucrats), the bureaucracy controlled all commerce and daily life.  They did this by having a stranglehold not only on all resources but, also, on the entirety of the symbol systems in these cities.

Is information power?

We often hear that “information is power”: a convenient little meme that, as with most memes, has a kernal of truth wrapped in a shroud of fuzzyness.  Information, following Bateson, is a difference that makes a difference.  In other words, “information” does not and cannot exist outside of an interpretive framework.

Now, some of this “interpretive framework” is based on our biological neccessities – think of our physical requirements for food, drink, protection from the elements, etc.  Where the framework enters is in defining what is classed as “food”, “drink” and “protection”.  Indeed, objective items that might be classifiable along these lines that are classed as both “is” and “is not” food (dring, protection, etc.) gives us a basic cultural taxonomy that actually feeds back into the biological nature of the group and impacts it by acting as positive and negative selection criteria.  Think, for example, how long a genetic propensity towards lactose intolerance would last in a community that relied on milk products for the bulk of their food.

“Information” is not power; the interpretive schemas that define what is information are power.  It is like those Russian dolls that nest inside each other.  Real power, the power to define how the world is seen, lies with the construction, maintenance and control over how reality is ordered and defined since this ordering defines what is and is not information.  And this is where bureaucracies first developed back when we, as a species, decided to move to horticulture lo those many millenia ago.

The bureaucratic imperative

Years ago, one of the books I was reading made the comment that organizations are designed to create problems for their members to have fun solving.  It’s a nice inversion of the normal way of looking at things that caught my attention, and one that is quite germaine to any talk about bureaucracies.  As we all know, the first step to solving a problem is to define it, right?  Well, the act of definition is an act of constructing an interpretive framework while, at the same time, constructing an approved way of “solving” the “problem”.

In effect, organizations construct “games” for people to “play”; games with clear win, lose and draw positions and set, defined rules of “play”: people who “play by the rules” are in a psychological zone that Mihali Csikszentmihalyi termed flow.  Now, this psychological state is both socially supported and, at the same time, quite addictive; going against the “rules” often produces a highly negative response (as in kill the heretic!).

Now, many of these organizationally created “games” have their roots in communal solutions to certain basic, biological needs, while others are developed to support the basic interpretive structures that define more basic “games” (yes, Virginia, I am a Malinowskian functionalist).  The problem, of course, is that, over time, these basic game structures, the “rules”, get further and further out of whack with objective reality and require tweaking or, in some cases, ouright major changes.

Who is going to do the tweaking and the major changes?  This is where bureaucracies have their focus – as the socially approved arbiters of rules and rule changes, and it is the locus of bureaucratic power: the source of the bureaucratic imperative.

Loosely speaking, the bureaucratic imperative may be operationally defined as the “need” for bureaucratic organizations to control their social “right” and power to define their focal segmnemt of reality, and to control the rules and rules changes of the “games” they claim to control.  This “need to control” is stronger, at least if history is any guide, than the “need” for the society itself to survive; consider, by way of example, the effects of the bureaucracies in the Byzantine Empire.

Concluding thoughts

Have you ever wondered why IT departments in large organizations are de facto Luddites, why some military planners do not want to simulate reality, or why Ward Churchill had to be be defined as “not a scholar“?  The answers are simple: new technology, new styles of warfare and research that disagrees with dominant political stances and definitions of reality threaten the bureaucratic imperative which is to control how reality is defined.   Bureaucratic organizations must maintain this control, otherwise they will disappear, and they will use all the tools at their disposal to eliminate their opponents, the people who think outside of the bozes they create.

Category: Communications Theory, Epistemology
Tags: Bureaucratic Imperative, Information