As many of you might know from reading my previous post I work for the Department of Veterans Affairs which I will just refer to as the VA. The VA is well known for being a Bureaucratic organization so it was no surprise to me that I found this section in ch. 3 to be very interesting and easy to relate to.
The book mentions that many people associate bureaucracy with red tape and inflexibility. I will agree that I find the VA to be very inflexible because it so large and there are so many different divisions and the hierarchy there is just ridiculous, you have to go through a service of people and loads of paperwork just get simple tasks done such as fixing the air conditioning. For example a WHOLE MONTH ago I put in a request to our warehouse to have 3 pallets of craft supplies delivered to my office and they only just delivered them last week after a month of waiting.
However Charles Perrow defends bureaucracy and argues that the machine it self ought not be blamed but rather the people who misuse it to further their own interests. I can also agree with this statement because there have been some very important people at the the top of the hierarchy at the VA that have abused their powers and failed the Veterans of the United States and thus stricter regulations and new rules were placed on employees thus making it an even more stifle environment to work in.
Avaliação Parcial - Empreendedorismo
15 years ago
2 comments:
Your experience with bureaucracy at the Veterans Affairs office makes me think of an anecdote my husband tells about his experience with the bureaucracy of educational offices. His company supplies printers and toner to companies and organizations throughout the valley. One of his clients is the County Office of Education and he also has several individual schools. On more than one occasion, he has noticed that the Office of Education will order literally pallets of toner cartridges. The purchases are “for a rainy day” as opposed to reflecting their immediate needs, because he always gets questions about shelf life. On the flip side, he will have individual schools call to order toner cartridges one at a time due to budgetary constraints. He even had a client once ask if she could order “half a toner cartridge”, to save money.
The meaning that I interpret from this story is that Perrow’s idea that the problem is the people who manipulate bureaucracy really rings true. I don’t think that anyone every intended to leave individual school sites in such desperate need of basic supplies while the office of ed is flush with supplies to spare, but that is what has grown out of one of the biggest bureaucracies in California: Education.
I often feel that bureacracy takes away the ability to be creative and think for yourself, as well as being completely ineffiecient at times. I realize bureaucracy is a mechanism used to maintain order, protect employees, and prevent organizations from abuse and liability. However, it removes the ability to really think outside the box and use common sense when necessary.
During a recent work related emergency a lack of phones became an issue when law enforcement and the fire department could not communicate. AT&T was activated immediately to install special phones lines to faciltate the communication quckly. The project of installing phones took more than 8 hours to activate. This was a critical event where phones were a priority. The reason it took 8 hours to obtain phones lines was due to the phone company not having the correct account number for the installation. The phones could have been operational within 2 hours had it not been for a bureaucratic piece of paper holding up the process.
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