Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Third Collection

Titel: A Third Collection

Stichwort: Entfremdung: Institutionen, Bürokratie; bias

Kurzinhalt: that the large establishment and its bureaucratic organization is a fourfold source of that conjunction of dissatisfaction and hopelessness that is named alienation and foments revolutions.

Textausschnitt: 20/5 Ours is a time of very large establishments. They are conspicuous in finance, industry, commerce. They have kept growing on all levels of government with its numerous,
()
21/5 The numerous tasks to be performed in a large establishment generate the type of organization named bureaucracy.
()
22/5 The more precise the policies, the more efficient the procedures, the more exigent the standards and their controls, then the closer will be the approximation to the ideal bureaucracy.
()
23/5 It remains that the large establishment and its bureaucratic organization is a fourfold source of that conjunction of dissatisfaction and hopelessness that is named alienation and foments revolutions. (61; Fs)

30/5 The large establishment and its bureaucratic administration, then, suffer from four defects. Its products and its services are specified by universals, but the good is always more concrete than a set of universals. Its mode of operation is rigid with little tolerance for discretionary adaptation. Its capacity for the more alert observation and the more critical reflection that generate revised ideas and remodeled operations seems no greater than that attributed to the scientific community by Thomas Kuhn. Its size, finally, its complexity, and its solidarity with other large establishments and bureaucracies provide a broad field for the ingenuity of egoists, the biases of groups, the disastrous oversights of 'practical' common sense. (63; Fs) (notabene)

24/5 For policies, procedures, standards are all expressed in general terms. Generalities never reach the full determinateness of concrete reality. But what is good has to be good in every respect, for the presence of any defect makes it bad. My point is very ancient, for over two millennia ago Aristotle pronounced equity to be virtue and defined it as a correction of the law where the law is defective owing to its universality. Like laws, the policies, procedures, standards of a bureaucracy are universal. But unlike laws, they are not tolerant of equitable correction. (61; Fs)