Have you got a 27B/6?
Bureaucratic structures and the bureaucratic personality
The Story
One morning, Sam, the lead character in Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopic science fiction movie Brazil, wakes up, drenched in sweat, to find that the air conditioning in his apartment has stopped working and his thermometer reads 95 degrees. He calls “Central Services,” only to receive a typically non-helpful bureaucratic response. Sam falls asleep with his head inside the open refrigerator, but then there is a knock at the door. It’s a man named Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a renegade freelance mechanical engineer and outlaw who illegally repairs heating and air conditioning systems. He intercepted Sam’s call and came right over. As he gets to work, he talks about how he used to work for Central Services himself, but hated all the paperwork, including “Form 27B/6.” Harry finds the problem, replaces a part, and then there is another knock at the door. Harry draws a gun and hides while Sam opens the door. He’s greeted by two officious men in coveralls—one short and round and one tall and thin—named Spoor and Dowser. They are from Central Services and have come to fix the air conditioning. Sam tries to send them away with a bunch of excuses (“it fixed itself!”) but they grow suspicious and are intent on coming in until Sam, thinking quickly, says, “Have you got a 27B/6?” The stumped, rule-following bureaucrats huff and puff and then angrily depart, vowing to return with the required form. Once the coast is clear, Harry slips out onto the balcony, where he clips onto a zipline attached to the railing and escapes, plunging diagonally across the void between two modernist high-rises and disappearing around the corner. (I suspect this movie is a favorite of mechanical engineers, who are rarely depicted as zipline-escaping heroes.)
A day or two later, Sam returns to his apartment, where, according to the screenplay: “The place is in a state of turmoil. Servicing panels are off the walls. Conduit, ducting, pipes, unknown mechanical horrors spew from the wall as if the place was disemboweled. Spoor stands in the middle of it all trying to direct two other workmen who are poring over wiring plans which seem to make little sense to them. Dowser is not visible but there is a great deal of clunking and banging going on somewhere behind the wall.” When Sam tells them to leave, Spoor produces the Form 27B/6 and demands that Sam sign it—and 43 carbon copies. Just then, Dowser bursts through a hole in the wall holding a suspicious looking part and Spoor angrily asks,
“You've had that scab Tuttle here, haven't you? Central Services don't take kindly to sabotage!”
The workmen stop working, gather up their tools, and depart, leaving the apartment in ruins. The last to leave is Spoor, who stops to tear off the bottom copy of the Form 27B/6 and thrust it into Sam’s hand, warning him not to “pit wits against Central Services,” before slamming the door.1
The Theory
Terry Gilliam apparently has a dim view of bureaucrats, and while Spoor and Dowser are extreme examples, we have all had experiences with the type. Fortunately, a robust canon of scholarly literature offers insight into both bureaucratic structures and “the bureaucratic personality.” For bureaucratic structures, a good place to start is Max Weber’s theory of rational bureaucracy, summarized by Fritz Sager as follows: “At the ideal type’s core lies a hierarchically structured, professional, rule-bound, impersonal, meritocratic, and disciplined body of public servants who possess a specific set of competencies and who operate outside the sphere of politics.”2
But for a discussion of the bureaucratic personality, our best guide is Robert K. Merton, whose 1940 article, “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” remains an oft-cited classic of public administration literature and is so well-written—and entertaining—that I will quote from it at length here.3 Merton begins by acknowledging Weber’s contribution: “The chief merit of bureaucracy is its technical efficiency, with a premium placed on speed, expert control, continuity, discretion, and optimal returns on input.” Dryly recognizing that “The community at large, however, evidently emphasizes the imperfections of bureaucracy,” Merton goes on to explore how these imperfections are the product of a devotion to discipline and rules that can undermine the very goals of an organization. Merton then summarizes how rules are transformed from means to ends in four simple steps: “(1) An effective bureaucracy demands reliability of response and strict devotion to regulations. (2) Such devotion to the rules leads to their transformation into absolutes; they are no longer conceived as relative to a given set of purposes. (3) This interferes with ready adaptation under special conditions not clearly envisaged by those who drew up the general rules. (4) Thus, the very elements which conduce towards efficiency in general produce inefficiency in specific instances. Full realization of the inadequacy is seldom attained by members of the group who have not divorced themselves from the “meanings” which the rules have for them. These rules in time become symbolic in cast, rather than strictly utilitarian.” Merton concludes by illustrating how these four steps lead to the logical dénouement:
“An extreme product of this process of displacement of goals is the bureaucratic virtuoso, who never forgets a single rule binding his action and hence is unable to assist many of his clients.”
This is a pretty good description of Spoor, from Brazil.
The Lesson
First the good news: Most bureaucrats are not like Spoor and Dowser and many endeavor to do their best to help the people they serve. That said, Merton’s 85-year-old study still feels fresh and relevant, and bureaucrats continue to labor within a framework that—by its very nature and structure—rewards apolitical rule-following over creative thinking, customized service, and entrepreneurial behavior. Merton underscores the source of conflict that occurs when users of bureaucracy see their own problems as being unique, special, and worthy of personalized treatment (Sam), while the bureaucrats serving them must put these problems into rational categories and remain objective and non-personal (Spoor). A more personal form of conflict is that users of bureaucracy often see themselves as superior to bureaucrats, but when they engage with the system, they find that the bureaucrats have power over them.
"The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe."
- Dr. McCoy, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
Gilliam, Terry, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown, Brazil Screenplay, Final Draft, October 1983.
Sager, Fritz, “Weberian Bureaucracy,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, published online, 29 September 2021.
Merton, Robert K., “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” in Social Forces, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 18(4), May 1940, pages 560-568.