Beyond Red Tape: An Organizational Echelon Analysis of Necessary Bureaucracy

Abstract Scholars have documented how ineffective rules or “red tape”, and effective rules or “green tape” affect a public organization’s management and performance. However, they differ on whether red tape by definition (i.e., burdensome and unnecessary rules) can perform useful organizational functions. Rather, we further the “necessary bureaucracy” conceptualization by van Loon et al. who argue that some rules are burdensome yet functional—with a study of China’s political selection rules, we add a political functionality to this conceptualization, explaining why some rules are regarded as red tape by lower-echelon managers while considered as politically necessary (and not as red tape) by top-echelon organizational elites: The theory of institutional entropy suggests that all organizational systems are predisposed toward disarray. It takes significant maintenance efforts to keep a system together and aligned. Thus, despite its onerousness, necessary bureaucracy as a governance craft maintains an organization’s order for ensuring elites’ political control.