The problem of red tape
Max Travers · 2007
Red tape as a social problem – Classical perspectives on bureaucracy – Contemporary debates – Gouldner's constructionist approach Complaints about quality assurance – Academic malcontents – Two interview studies Experiencing everyday bureaucracy – An ethics application – Demonstrating quality in legal practice – Accreditation: a nurse's tale – Ticking the boxes – A negative case study Government initiatives to reduce red tape – Regulating the regulators – The Regulatory Impact Unit The politics of red tape Chapters Four and Five looked at quality assurance from the perspective of those committed to the goal of ‘continuous improvement’ in public sector work. Politicians and civil servants, government inspectorates concerned with quality assurance and managers in organisations all believe that professionals, if left to themselves, will not provide a satisfactory level of service to clients. They have to be made accountable through audit and inspection. This means that a large amount of managerial work inside organisations is concerned with collecting information about performance. The annual auditing cycle involves identifying problems, and making and implementing plans to achieve and demonstrate improvement. There may be problems with over-inspection, or overlapping systems of accountability, but, broadly speaking, both senior managers and the administrators who collect and analyse performance information genuinely believe that quality assurance is valuable and necessary, and can readily give examples of areas where improvement has been achieved or problems still need to be solved. What, though, are the views of the professionals working in organisations affected by these changes? How have they responded to quality assurance initiatives? And how do they experience quality assurance in their day-to-day work? It has already been suggested that professionalism involves claiming to know what is best for clients, by virtue of acquiring specialist expertise and knowledge, so one might expect doctors or teachers to feel at least mildly irritated by calls for greater monitoring and regulation. This chapter approaches this topic from a different angle by considering complaints about excessive paperwork and ‘red tape’. Since there may be readers looking for a straightforward critique of managerialism, it is worth stating from the outset that there is no suggestion that every professional shares these concerns, or that ‘red tape’ is an easy phenomenon to identify or describe.