Bureaucracy, Open Access, and Social Pluralism: Returning the Common to the Goose

Abstract

Bureaucracy has long been the object of fierce intellectual critique and political polemic. Over the last quarter of a century or so we have witnessed systematic attempts - influenced by public choice theory, and fuelled by popular resentment against bureaucratic power - to dismantle bureaucracies and replace them with organizational forms that are more 'flexible', more 'accountable', more 'responsive', more 'entrepreneurial', less 'hierarchical', and 'flatter'. However, in the meantime we also have a growing literature demonstrating that the measures designed to counter the dysfunctions of bureaucracy themselves have side effects that are highly undesirable.