Why bureaucracy matters, part 3: Bureaucracy’s ink-stained soul
True reform in the public service comes from integrating tradition with innovation, not chasing novelty or shortcuts.
First published in the Mandarin.
Bureaucracy has always been a part of us and always will be.
The metaphor of record-keeping is common in religion. Our sins and judgment are portrayed as an impartial, bureaucratic audit of lives. Our deeds are recorded in two ledgers, with the final tally determining our eternal fate. The image of a soul being audited combines the structure of bureaucracy (fair, impartial, and evidence-based) with its personal outcomes (responsibility and accountability). It is an image found throughout our bureaucratic systems.
Bureaucracy is a core element of modern society, seen both as a tool for creating order and sometimes as overly complex.
Laws and regulations, crafted through bureaucracy, are tested and refined in practice to ensure they are protective, representative, and humane, serving as a check on human authority.
Bureaucracy is deeply ingrained in our collective mindset. As David Graeber argued in his book The Utopia of Rules, our modern lives are shaped by an ever-growing, all-encompassing bureaucracy in both public and private spheres.
How then should we interpret the troubling notion that bureaucracy is the flawed, often frustrating system we’ve built to protect ourselves from our worst instincts?
I have always been here
Although we may believe our bureaucracy is ‘special,’ it fundamentally remains the same story repeated.
Early English bureaucracy served both symbolic and practical functions. In 893, King Alfred compiled laws and customs based on scripture and royal decree. The laws emphasised historical continuity; however, they also reflected social initiatives supported by bureaucratic systems aimed at helping ordinary people. For example, the historical practice of the feud was carefully restricted and regulated. The laws also protected victims of fraud and assault, including both men and women.
Two centuries later, William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book turned this idea into a detailed administrative system. His inspectors recorded every field, animal, and estate, creating a comprehensive register that unified governance, enhanced tax collection, and served as an early example of using administrative information as a source of power.
Alfred and William together highlight the potential and risks of bureaucracy. Over time, bureaucracy helped distribute power and incorporate territorial, social, and moral issues into systems of accountability.
The engineers of the Industrial Revolution
By the nineteenth century, bureaucracy had moved away from royal decree to become embedded in civic machinery.
Although bureaucracy no longer had divine associations, it still played a significant moral and ethical role. Writers such as Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens highlighted these issues and tensions by illustrating the human side of bureaucracy and the challenges of navigating it — Martineau, the advocate; Dickens, the critic.
Martineau and reform
Commissioned to turn the findings of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws into accessible fiction, Martineau wrote Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated and other novellas to transform the dense “Blue Books” of the royal commission into moral lessons for the middle class.
Her novels portrayed the old parish-based relief system as chaotic and corrupt, prone to manipulation by clever paupers and ineffectual administrators. She advocated for a professional, centralised, and impersonal bureaucracy managed by capable officials who would impose rational order.
Martineau sought to build trust and confidence in the effort to centralise Britain’s traditionally localised administrative practices. Her stories about daily interactions between paupers and administrators introduced a new focus on the exchanges between bureaucrats and the broader community.
Dickens and critique
Where Martineau saw potential in bureaucracy, Dickens saw absurdity.
Dickens pioneered the ‘bureaucratic horror story’, exposing how institutions built to promote fairness could instead trap and destroy the people they were meant to serve.
At the centre of Bleak House is the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case, which is so tangled in legal battles that it drains both people and resources. The chancery system becomes a self-perpetuating machine that depends on delays, confusion, and despair to keep itself running.
In Little Dorrit, Dickens introduces the Circumlocution Office, a department dedicated to the art of not getting anything done. Here, progress is slowed by excessive paperwork, endless forms, and faceless barriers.
Martineau saw bureaucracy as a way to improve fairness and efficiency in administration, whereas Dickens depicted it as impersonal, detached, and self-centred. His characters reveal the human suffering resulting from bureaucratic apathy: wasted talent, unfeeling individuals, and a sense of despair.
However, beneath Dickens’s criticism lies the same moral conviction that guided Martineau. The belief that governance should prioritise the needs of the people.
Together, they highlight the paradox at the core of the modern administrative approach: while bureaucracy safeguards justice and promotes fairness, it also always risks choking these same principles.
As the industrial age progressed, bureaucracy became the backbone of everyday life, shaping how nations functioned, learned, and sought to improve.
Evolving from within
The tension between Martineau’s faith in professional administration and Dickens’s distrust of its intentions continues to influence today’s discussions about public service. Calls to ‘cut red tape’ reflect Dickens’ frustrations, while efforts to rebuild trust in the public service’s competence and efficiency mirror Martineau’s belief in professionalisation.
The government and public service face a challenge that echoes their nineteenth-century dialogue: how to build fair systems without becoming paralysing, and to be efficient without undermining trust.
Australia’s real economic challenge isn’t just cutting bureaucracy but encouraging its evolution. However, the push for public service reform often borrows language from business and market sectors. Each reform promises to make the business of government more efficient.
Concepts like agility, customer experience, innovation, and disruption have become trends that have failed to boost efficiency or cut red tape. In fact, most have added to bureaucracy.
The paradox is that the most vital source of renewal for public service isn’t found in copying business practices but in tradition. True reform in public service doesn’t dismiss the legacy of bureaucracy; instead, it evolves it.
The challenge of administrative reform echoes T.S. Eliot’s idea in his 1919 essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent: being modern isn’t about abandoning the past, but about engaging with it more intentionally.
Eliot argued that a poet reaches maturity by developing what he called the historical sense: ‘a perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’. He maintained that tradition cannot be inherited; it must be earned through effort. Each new work of art reshuffles the existing order, just as the past influences the present. The poet’s responsibility is not to reject tradition but to engage with it.
Public institutions are no different. Bureaucracies, like literary traditions, are storehouses of accumulated wisdom. Bureaucratic routines, rules, and rituals are not simply annoying remnants of past eras; they are habits of judgment shaped by experience. When reformers see them as something to replace or modernise, they clash with the conditions that enable good government.
Eliot warned that chasing novelty for its own sake is less valuable than true innovation. The same idea applies to bureaucratic reform. Introducing private-sector management trends, digital slogans, or market metaphors without proper adaptation often results in superficial changes rather than real cultural transformation.
What truly lasts is not just imitation but integration: the ability to embrace new ideas while remaining faithful to the institution’s fundamental character.
Eliot’s poet can’t treat the past as a single block, nor concentrate only on a favourite era; instead, they must grasp the ‘main current’ and add subtle contributions that reshape the entire flow. Similarly, public service advances not by rejecting or repeating itself but through continuous refinement. Reforms and innovations stem from reinterpreting goals within new settings.
The ‘historical sense’ in bureaucracy could be called administrative imagination: the ability to recognise continuity within change, understanding that public institutions are not fixed by tradition but are continually evolving it.
The most effective bureaucratic reform is fundamentally impersonal. It doesn’t depend on charismatic leadership, often seen in market-driven change initiatives, but rather stems from the collective intelligence within the organisation.
If business innovation involves disruption, bureaucratic innovation is about maintaining continuity under unrelenting pressure. It considers how new practices can coexist with public accountability and responsibility. As a result, public service reform adapts the tradition of service to each new context. Today’s challenge is to understand and enhance the deep commitment to stewardship in a data-rich, AI-enabled world.
Eliot argued that the artist should live ‘not merely in the present, but in the present moment of the past. The same principle applies to bureaucratic reform: bureaucracy is not opposing progress but safeguarding it.
