Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions That Today Live Among the Indians Native to This New Spain, 1629 by Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón

Author:Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón [Alarcón, Hernando Ruiz de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, History, Native American
ISBN: 9780806120317
Google: xf9nQ2roM6EC
Goodreads: 43329272
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 1984-01-15T12:15:47+00:00

Bureaucracy

Three particular features of bureaucracy stand out in the context of corruption, two of them as undoubted perversions, delay and complication, and the third as a specifically geographical element – distance. The first of these is easily exemplified: de Soto’s (133–4) (experimental) attempt to set up a small clothing factory in Peru involved eleven bureaucratic stages which took 289 days. Ten bribes were requested, two of which were inescapable if progress was to be made. Both corruption and the informal economy thrive in such circumstances, creating quite a different geography of retailing and small scale industry from what would exist if the official processes were followed – or if they were simpler. Payments made to circumvent such official procedures are often called ‘speed money’. The effect is in fact quite the reverse for very soon the papers only move at all – and then slowly – if such payments are made. ‘Speed money’ for the few is a full stop for the many.

Complexity is evidently a close cousin of delay. Its role is simply stated by Reisman: ‘the more prescriptions there are the more deviance there can be’ (1979, 4). Rules and regulations often remain in force when they have become practically irrelevant, their origins and intentions forgotten (Perry, 1990, 203). In these circumstances the bribe is seen as the solution. However there are instances where complex rules are needed, building and safety standards for example, in which case the citizen is more likely to be the villain than is the politician planner or official whose culpability is rather a failure to demonstrate the benefits of such rules and to ensure that they are amended if there are none. Finally the close connexion between bureaucratic complexity (defensible or contrived) and bureaucratic confusion and incompetence deserves mention.

The question of distance in this bureaucratic context is not only the most complicated and controversial but also the most obviously geographical. Quite apart from the more strictly geographical interpretation however the question also arises of the distance between official and citizen. How necessary to honest and effective government is it that the citizen be kept at arms length? How risky, how wise are endeavours to humanise and strengthen the system by incorporating a citizen input, or at least listening to what he or she has to say, in the decision making process? In the more specifically geographical sense distance becomes a major component of bureaucratic geography and thus in turn of the structure of government. There is and has been here enormous variation. At first sight decentralisation of decision taking, the locus of corruption, seems to have been inevitable until almost instantaneous communication – the telegraph is probably the key invention – became possible. But Spain tried to run a most centralised empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and while the centralist tradition in France peaked in the age of train and telegraph this was really the extension of an older tradition. The decentralisation of public procurement in France has been argued as

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