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Bureaucracy and Efficiency

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Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance
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Synonyms

Bureaucracy: Civil servants; Government officials; Public sector employees

Efficiency: Effectualness; Efficacy

Definition

Bureaucracy: A system of administration distinguished by its clear hierarchy of authority, rigid division of labor, written and inflexible rules, regulations, and procedures, and impersonal relationships.

Efficiency: The state or quality of being efficient or able to accomplish something with the least waste of time and effort; competency in performance.

Introduction

Rising economic inquiry on the provision of goods and services by public institutions sparked an investigative research on the efficient allocation of resources within public sector organizations (Duncombe et al. 1997; Pedraja-Chaparro et al. 2005). Whereas neoclassical assumptions on the theory of firm put forward by Coase (1937) and Alchian and Demsetz (1972) assume that a firm is always expected to operate at the efficient production frontier, unpredicted divergences from the neoclassical...

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Correspondence to Taptuk Emre Erkoc .

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Erkoc, T.E. (2017). Bureaucracy and Efficiency. In: Farazmand, A. (eds) Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_617-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_617-1

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