Bureaucracy and Red Tape.(Review)

Barry Bozeman, Bureaucracy and Red Tape (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2000). 210 pp., $28.40 paper.

As every teacher of public administration knows, the term red tape refers to the cord that tied together government documents in the early centuries of British and American bureaucracy, and probably those of other former colonies as well. For the trivia minded, the tape was a loosely woven fabric (probably wool), brick red in color, and 7/16th of an inch wide when ironed flat. (As one of the field's antiquarians, I have a piece embedded in plastic.)

More importantly, of course, the term red tape is the leading pejorative symbol of government bureaucracy in the English language. Most discussions of it consist of thoughtless denunciations of what are regarded as the inefficient and malevolent workings of government. Some scholars of public administration have taken the topic to the more serious level of showing how the deeper meanings of the term are capable of conveying the subjective nature and complex subtleties of large-scale administration in a democratic polity. Some decades ago Herbert Kaufman published a small volume that did just that (1977). In this new book, Barry Bozeman has elevated the notion of red tape to a new height, that of a clearly defined and researchable phenomenon of public and private administration.

The book begins as an easy read. In its first 72 pages it discusses the several ways in which the term is used, describes existing literature on the subject, notes how one person's red tape is another's due process, discusses concepts of formalism in organizations, reviews various theories on the pathologies of bureaucracy, and comments ,on ever-present efforts to reform public bureaucracy, including contemporary ones like the Government Performance and Results Act. In …