Bureaucracy

by Gordon Tullock, Charles K. Rowley (Editor)

Overview

Bureaucracy provides access to two important and influential books on bureaucracy by Gordon Tullock: The Politics of Bureaucracy (1965) and Economic Hierarchies, Organization and the Structure of Production (1992).

When The Politics of Bureaucracy was published in 1965, bureaucracy was viewed by many people as benign—serving the public good with objectivity and omniscience.

In Economic Hierarchies, Organization and the Structure of Production, Tullock looks at bureaucracy in a different but related way, basing his new book on developments in the theory of the firm that had occurred during the intervening period. By comparing the politics of bureaucracy with the economics of industrial organization, Tullock demonstrates that corporations perform with greater economic efficiency than do government bureaus.

Gordon Tullock is Professor Emeritus of Law at George Mason University, where he was Distinguished Research Fellow in the Center for Study of Public Choice and UniversityProfessor of Law and Economics. He also taught at the Universityof South Carolina, the Universityof Virginia, Rice University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and the Universityof Arizona. In 1966 he founded the journal that became Public Choice and remained its editor until 1990.

Charles K. Rowley was Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason Universityand a Senior Fellow of the James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy at George Mason University. He was also General Director of the Locke Institute.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780865975361
Publisher:	Liberty Fund, Incorporated
Publication date:	06/20/2005
Series:	The Selected Works of Gordon Tullock , #6
Edition description:	Volume 6
Pages:	454
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.15(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Table of Contents

Introduction, by Charles K. Rowley ix

THE POLITICS OF BUREAUCRACY
Foreword, by James M. Buchanan 3

PART 1. INTRODCUTION
1. What This Book Is About 13
2. Preliminaries 19

PART 2. THE POLITICIAN’S WORLD
3. The General Atmosphere 39
4. Spectators and Allies 51
5. The Politician’s World—The Sovereigns 57
6. The Single Sovereign Situation 70
7. The Group Sovereign 89
8. Multiple Sovereigns 109
9. Peers, Courtiers, and Barons 115
10. The Followers 125

PART 3. LOOKING DOWNWARD
11. Subordinates and Inferiors 131
12. Know Thyself 140
13. Parkinson’s Law 145
14. Whispering Down the Lane 148
15. A Mental Experiment 153
16. The Experiment Continued 160
17. Limitations on Organizational Tasks 168
18. Relaxing Requirements 176
19. The Problem of Control 189
20. Enforcement 197
21. Judgment by Results 205
22. Labor Saving Devices—Cost Accounting 210
23. Labor Saving Devices—Miscellaneous 217
24. External Checks 224

PART 4. CONCLUSION
25. What to Do? What to Do? 235

ECONOMIC HIERARCHIES, ORGANIZATION
AND THE STRUCTURE OF PRODUCTION
Preface 241
1. Introduction 243
2. Why Hierarchical Organizations? Why Not? 248
3. Parallel Problems 263
4. In the Belly of the Beast 279
5. Life in the Interior 295
6. Structural Reform 313
7. Termites 327
8. A General Picture 340
9. Random Allocation 353
10. Rent Seeking and the Importance of Disorganization 375
11. Restricted Scope 387
12. Incentives 400
13. Summing Up 416

Index 423