The Philippine bureaucracy is one characterized as largely incapable of guiding the process of late industrialization because it has inherited from its colonial rulers a weak civil service. It is plagued with problems that include too many employees, uncompetitive salaries, duplication of functions and lack of accountability. It is so inefficient and corrupt that according to the Ombudsman in a recent statement, bureaucratic corruption costs taxpayers one billion pesos yearly. Even when you have reformists as leaders at the helm, the higher bureaucracy can still interpret and implement the president's reforms in a way that preserves the power, prestige and privileges of the oligarchic interest-groups that are its traditional allies. The ills that trouble our nation can be ameliorated by increasing political capacity in enhancing the legitimacy and effectiveness of State institutions.
David Osborne and Ted Gaebler articulate in their book Reinventing Government a new form of public management patterned after the customer service model as practiced in the private business sector. In this model, citizens are regarded as customers while the administrative role is restructured by converting policy alternatives into market choices. This approach focuses on results and promotes competition both inside and outside the bureaucracy.
While Osborne and Gaebler contemplated that the American governmental bureaucracy, which was appropriate to the industrial era and times of economic and military crisis during which it was created, is not the best system of governance for the post-industrial information age, the same may not be said about the Philippine bureaucracy.
Filipinos increasingly want quality and choice of goods and services and efficiency of producers just like the Americans in 1960s. However, quality and choice are not what bureaucracies are designed to provide, nor is efficiency possible in a system of complex rules and drawn-out decision-making. Moreover, limited national funds has made it more difficult for local government units to meet the continued citizen demand for services and increasing expectations for quality.
Osborne and Gaebler’s prescription of entrepreneurial government, which focuses on results, decentralizes authority, reduces bureaucracy, and promotes competition both inside and outside government will only work in the Philippine context given the assumption that there is a critical mass of viable private business sector models for local government units to replicate. Also, the redefinition of government's clients as “customers” who are empowered by being able to choose among providers of various services, including schools, health plans, and housing options again depend on factors that include a well informed and assertive public in the Philippines.
The dysfunctions of bureaucracy as identified by Weber include oligarchy, rationalization, calculability, and dehumanization, among others. Other sociologists before and since Weber, have identified variations of these dysfunctions or have since modified and added to the list. There is general agreement in their collective assertions especially the following: that bureaucracy tends to result in oligarchy, or rule by the few, by officials at the top of the organization because of their self-serving and self-perpetuating practices; that bureaucracies are built on the principles of efficiency and calculability; and that they progressively replace traditional social organizations with rational organizations designed to perform like machines. Other dysfunctions of bureaucracy since Weber have been proposed to include the stifling red tape created by convoluted rules of the organization; divisions of labor compartmentalizing attention and response; hierarchy can mean silos, and that employees and processes must go up and down chains of command to get things done; and certain irrationalities result as byproducts of bureaucratic processes.
Building on Weber’s view of bureaucracy, Robert Merton offers a critique of modern problems associated with dysfunctions that result from bureaucracy. In Social Theory and Social Structure, Merton, focuses on what he described as theories of the “Middle Range”, intermediate theories between minor, day-to-day research hypotheses and all inclusive, grandiose, conceptual schemes. Merton examines a “typology of individual adaptation” of which conformity is one of five types he examines. It is conformity that he sees as a concern in modern bureaucracy. Merton describes organizations as integrated set of offices, each with their own obligations and competences and disciplined by rules and responsibilities. Much Like Weber’s view, Merton described that relations between offices require sufficient formality to ensure smooth operation and consistent expectation of behavior.
As gleaned from other sociologists bureaucracies have perceived drawbacks including:
Veblen’s Trained Incapacity wherein one’s training is no longer adequate for the position, due to inadequate flexibility; Dewey’s Occupational Psychosis which describes the preferences, discriminations and biases bred by routines; blindspots that develop from routine can lead to limitations and suboptimal results; formalism leads to rigidities and inability to adjust particularly to the problem of “bureaucratic redtape”.
Sociological schools of thought at large evidently emphasize the imperfections of bureaucracy, as afforded by the application of Veblen's concept of "trained incapacity," Dewey's notion of "occupational psychosis" or Warnotte's view of "professional deformation." Trained incapacity refers to that state of affairs in which one's abilities function as inadequacies or blind spots. Actions based upon training and skills, which have been successfully applied in the past, may result in inappropriate responses under changed conditions. An inadequate flexibility in the application of skills will, in a changing milieu, result in more or less serious maladjustments. In general, one adopts measures in keeping with one's past training and, under new conditions, which are not recognized as significantly different, the very soundness of this training may lead to the adoption of the wrong procedures.
Dewey's concept of occupational psychosis, pronounced character of the mind, rests upon much the same observations. As a result of their day-to-day routines, people develop special preferences, aversions, discriminations and emphases. These psychoses develop through demands put upon the individual by the particular organization of his occupational role. The concepts of both Veblen and Dewey refer to a fundamental ambivalence. Any action can be considered in terms of what it attains or what it fails to attain. A way of seeing is also a form of blindness, a surgical focus on one particular task to a point of neglecting other tasks. In his discussion, Weber is almost exclusively concerned with what the bureaucratic structure attains: precision, reliability, efficiency. This same structure may be examined from another perspective provided by the ambivalence. He uses this knowledge to criticize the structure and considers the fallacies of a bureaucracy. In the final analysis, a bureaucracy in perfect form may seem flawless, but Merton explains that the structural rules and guidelines that make a true bureaucracy can be its biggest weaknesses.
How can the Philippine government be reinvented?
Osborne and Gaebler gave numerous examples such as contracts, vouchers, grants, and tax incentives in demonstrating that catalytic governments must separate steering, or providing guidance and direction, from rowing, or producing goods and services. In the Philippine context this concept could be applied in many aspects of the Philippine bureaucracy to streamline their operations and provide Filipinos with even just the most basic goods and services that is due them. Control of services should also be pushed out of the bureaucracy, into the community through privatization of services otherwise poorly delivered by a highly convoluted Philippine bureaucracy. The strengthening of local government units though the distribution of the central power concentrated in Manila would bring communities into the picture and empower the people who are the intended recipients of services and results in better performance. Improving both the quality and cost-effectiveness of government services can be achieved through competition rather than regulation. Introducing competition does not necessarily mean that a service will be completely turned over to the private sector rather the crucial function of competition is ending government monopolies.
The Philippine government must be mission-driven and deregulate internally to eliminate many of its internal rules and radically simplifying its administrative systems such as budget, personnel, and procurement. Leaders should require each agency to get clear on its mission, then agency heads to find the best way to accomplish that mission, within legal bounds. As a result-oriented government, Philippines could shift accountability from inputs to outputs, or results. It should measure the performance and reward agencies, so they often exceed their goals. As a customer-driven government, it could make an effort to perceive the needs of the citizens and to give customers a choice of producers and service providers. Officials should use surveys and focus groups to listen to their constituents, and put resources in the people’s hands. The government must be enterprising enough to stress earning rather than spending money. They charge user fees and impact fees, and use incentives such as enterprise funds, shared earnings, and innovation funds to encourage managers to earn money.
Philippine officials should always be proactive in seeking to prevent problems rather than delivering services to correct them. They should redesign budget systems, accounting systems, and reward systems to create the appropriate incentives. They must work to decentralize the government and transfer decision-making authority to those individuals and LGU’s at the bottom of the organizational hierarchy, closest to the people. They could restructure organizations and empower employees and create labor-management partnerships. They should be market-oriented and utilize a market mechanism instead of an administrative program to provide goods and services to the public.
Using James D. Thompson’s Organizations in Action as reference, critique his propositions on organizational rationality by applying these on an organization of your choice. Specifically on the following issues: Domains, Organizational Design, Technology and Structure, Power and Authority.
James Thompson, in his book Organizations in Action (1967), depicts two traditionally competing views of the organization: the closed-system (rational model: simplified, controlled environment) and the open-system (natural-system model: bounded rationality, organization in environmental context). The University of St. La Salle (USLS) as an organization could be considered to be patterned mostly after Thompson’s rational model. On the basis of establishing domains, USLS minimizes the power of elements potentially relevant to goal setting and attainment by maintaining status quo among the environmental elements that impact the organization such as enrolment trends, turnover rate among the staff, curricular changes and others. The curriculum and its course offering, likened to business product lines, are constantly diversified and broadened in scope as part of domain expansion, not solely for this purpose but for the manifest rationale of improving the range of services it offers to its student clientele.
It also competes with other universities for support by amplifying its prestige in the academic community through hard-work in order to place high in professional board examinations, winning national and international academic competitions, and expanding its research track. University prestige could also be underscored by acclamation of successful graduates in their respective fields. Prestige is important for USLS as an organization because this is one way by which it enhances its competitive power in the academic market. Thompson proposes that organizations with concentrated support capacity will normally seek power from those on whom they are dependent. This characteristic is shared by USLS in that its support capacity could also be concentrated on its alumni and benefactors in whom its power largely resides. A number of programs are in place to nurture its relationship with the alumni and foster linkages with current and future benefactors.
On organizational design, as any other organization, USLS seeks to place boundaries around activities which would be contingencies if left to environment. The nature of modes of operation is such that contracts are drafted not so much as to protect the interest of the other party but primarily to protect the vested interest of the institution. Waivers are commonly used in the discharge of many university duties for the same foregoing purpose.
As far as organizational design as conceived by Thompson, USLS uses the decentralized rather than the centralized design. USLS is decentralize in a sense that each La Salle institution is independent of other La Sallian institutions in many aspects including major decision making process, budget, income generation and disbursement of funds, curriculum design, and course offering. It could only be considered centralized in that all La Salle institutions all over the globe have one vision of tending to the needs of at-risk youth through the methods and charism of its founder St. La Salle.
Structure at USLS is characterized by major colleges further segmented or departmentalized, and connections are established within and between departments. It is a socio-technical system containing both human and nonhuman resources and facilities. Structure is a fundamental vehicle by which USLS achieves bounded rationality. USLS helps members gain efficiency by delimiting responsibilities and control over resources. If structure affords numerous spheres of bounded rationality, it must also facilitate the coordinated action of interdependent elements. To say that USLS is composed of interdependent parts does not mean that each part is dependent on and supports every other part in any direct way. Yet they may be interdependent in the sense that unless each performs adequately, the total Lasallian organization is jeopardized. In terms of technology and structure USLS has a structure that is its fundamental vehicle for achieving bounded rationality.
Using Thompson’s three strategies to acquire power as reference, USLS negotiates agreements with other institutions and agencies to reduce uncertainty. In contracting Internship slots with cooperating schools, the university drafts a memorandum of agreement with the other party to ensure the protection of the interests and the quality instruction of its student teachers in the field. It also co-opts or “coalesces” with other agencies and institutions to pursue common objectives. Unlike in traditional societies where power and authority are legitimated by tradition, at USLS they are legitimated by merit, acceptability, charisma and even one’s ability to perpetuate the conventions of the Lasallian institution. Administrators are entitled to the position authority, which in turns entitles them to direct the work of their subordinates. Others beneath them in the hierarchy could possess staff authority created to support, assist and advice the holders of line of authority.
Power is exercised also as described by Thompson as legitimate: based on ones position in the formal hierarchy; reward: based on the ability to distribute something that others value; expert: based on ones expertise, special skills or knowledge. Prestige-seeking is preferred in maintaining a favorable image as a way to control dependence.
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