Beyond Red Tape: An Organizational Echelon Analysis of Necessary Bureaucracy

Abstract

Scholars have documented how ineffective rules or “red tape”, and effective rules or “green tape” affect a public organization’s management and performance. However, they differ on whether red tape by definition (i.e., burdensome and unnecessary rules) can perform useful organizational functions. Rather, we further the “necessary bureaucracy” conceptualization by van Loon et al. who argue that some rules are burdensome yet functional—with a study of China’s political selection rules, we add a political functionality to this conceptualization, explaining why some rules are regarded as red tape by lower-echelon managers while considered as politically necessary (and not as red tape) by top-echelon organizational elites: The theory of institutional entropy suggests that all organizational systems are predisposed toward disarray. It takes significant maintenance efforts to keep a system together and aligned. Thus, despite its onerousness, necessary bureaucracy as a governance craft maintains an organization’s order for ensuring elites’ political control.

Keywords:

• China
• green tape
• organizational maintenance
• red tape
• rule-breaking

Acknowledgement

The author would like to thank the editor as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their very insightful comments that significantly improved the paper. All errors remain my own.

Notes

1 The State Council (1996).

2 Elite interviewees 3 and 4: Party organization cadre in the organization work sector, interview in Dec/2014; Party cadre in the organization work sector, date Dec/2014. (For detailed interviewee list, see Online Supplement 2).

3 The Southern Weekend (2015).

4 Elite cadre interviewee number 5: Party retired cadre in the organization work sector, date Dec/2014.

5 Elite cadre interviewee number 18: Shanghai cadre in the education sector, date May/2015.

6 Elite cadre interviewee number 8: Central ministry cadre in the propaganda sector, date Jan/2015.

7 Non-elite cadre interviewee number 2: Party organization cadre in the organization work sector, date Dec/2014.

8 The CCP Central Organization Department (1992).

9 Elite cadre interviewee 16: Tianjin cadre in the engineering related sector, date April/2015.

10 Non-elite interviewee 12: Beijing cadre in the organization work sector, date May/2015.

11 The State Council (1996).

12 The CCP Central Committee (2002).

13 The CCP Central Committee (2014).

14 Elite Interviewees 3 and 4, as aforementioned.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Science Fund of Beijing Municipality [Grant Number: 18ZGC012] and the Institute of Public Governance, Peking University [Grant Number: YBXM202207].

Notes on contributors

Yi Yang

Dr. Yi Yang is an assistant professor of public management at the School of Government, Peking University, China. He publishes in the fields of organizational theory, public administration, and political science including in journals like Policy Sciences, Administration & Society, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, Journal of Critical Realism, Systems Research and Behavioral Science, among others. He is an associate editor of Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, a major social theory journal and serves on the editorial boards of several academic outlets.