The Bureaucracy

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Bureaucracies are a major facet of modern life. Most government agencies and corporations are organized as bureaucracies. They enable large numbers of people to be coordinated to produce an effect, but there are obvious costs:

• Institutional homeostasis: Bureaucracies resist change. They are quite slow to adapt and tend to be poor at creativity and innovation.
• De-individualization: An employee is treated more or less as a standardized widget in a larger machine. Roles are standardized so that employees can be pulled out and dropped in with greater efficiency. Conformity is stressed at the expense of originality and individuality.
• Machiavellianism: Bureaucracies tend to reward an ability to "play the game." This can usually most easily be accomplished by flattering/sucking up to superiors and mostly just making other people feel good about themselves (i.e., teamwork). As people (particularly the bureaucrat) will be skeptical of anything new or different, the incentives are geared towards cynically agreeing with the status quo, which reinforces the stasis.
• Centralization: Decision making is centralized, coming from the top down. People lower on the org chart have less autonomy and less decision-making authority. Opinions from people more senior in the hierarchy are taken as more influential than opinions from people more junior, regardless of merit.
• Inefficiency: Much time is spent working the bureaucracy; less time is spent on what might be regarded as more productive work.

The company I work for is like this. When you mention a new idea to a manager, or supervisor that can help improve the company, they more or less blow you off, because your the "little guy". A couple of months, or years go buy, and they finally decide to make those same changes you mentioned earlier, either because one of their higher-up buddies makes the same suggestion, or they are forced into action.

It seems like the bigger the institution gets, the bigger bureaucracy it becomes...