Challenging Parkinson’s Law

Cyril Northcote Parkinson’s lifetime accomplishments are impressive indeed. He received his doctorate in history from King’s College, London. Over the course of his academic career, he served as Master of the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, Lecturer in History at the University of Liverpool, Raffles Professor of History at the University of Malaya, and as a visiting professor at several distinguished U.S. institutions of higher learning. Parkinson wrote more than 60 books, a number of which were devoted to naval and maritime history, his specialty. These included serious studies of a famous frigate captain of the Napoleonic Wars [Edward Pellew Viscount Exmouth] (1934), merchant shipping in asian waters during the same period (1937), and the rise of the port of Liverpool (1952). Upon his death on 9 March 1993 at age 83, however, he was best known as the author of a nine-page humorous article for The Economist in 1958 titled “Parkinson’s Law or The Rising Pyramid.”

The law, expressed in a mere 12 words, read “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” From this Parkinson reasoned that because “work (and especially paperwork) is . . . elastic in its demands on time” that there need be “little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned.” He directed his observations specifically at the phenomenon of government growth, which he believed was out of all proportion to the amount of bureaucratic product required to service even an advanced industrial society. The proliferation of government administrators and clerical workers, he was convinced, was unnecessary and thus a waste of resources.

Parkinson’s squib caused an immediate sensation. When the author joined the original article with other pieces on the same theme, the resulting book sold nearly a quarter-million copies in two years. Parkinson became one of Britain’s most quoted authors and lectured widely in the United States. In Britain, “Parkinson’s Law” was made into a musical with an overture scored for typewriters. In Czechoslovakia, it became a play. In the United States, the Walt Disney Company considered it promising material for a film. Negotiations reputedly broke down, however, only because no part could be found in the production for Hayley Mills, whose acting career Disney had been promoting vigorously at the time. So the project was canceled.

Parkinson later recalled that the concept of his law had come to him as a result of his experience in the British armed forces during World War II. He had been assigned in 1942 to a joint headquarters as an assistant to a wing commander, who served under an army colonel, who in turn worked for an air vice marshal. One day, the air vice marshal went on leave. Then the colonel became ill. And after this the wing commander departed to attend a course, which left Parkinson in charge. Work, he recollected, “had lessened as each of my superiors had disappeared, by the time it came to me, there was nothing to do at all.”

At the beginning of his article, Parkinson described another case, this one obviously fictitious. He told the story of an “elderly lady of leisure” who, in the process of writing a postcard to her niece, spent an hour finding the postcard, another hour looking for her glasses, a half-hour in search of the address, an hour-and-a- quarter in composition, and 20 minutes to determine whether or not an umbrella was necessary to cover her trip to the local postbox. Effort that would have taken a busy professional three minutes, Parkinson observed, had left another “prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety, and toil.” 

Anecdote, while suitable as amusing decoration, could not support adequately what Parkinson had intended to be a serious argument. For this task, he resorted to a more powerful form of discourse. In an attempt to prove his law’s validity, Parkinson turned to the history of the Royal Navy, and in particular, the recent history of British naval administration. This subject, he informed his readers, had been the starting point of his statistical research, and he chose it on the grounds that the responsibilities of the Admiralty were “more easily measurable than those of, say, the Board of Trade,” being merely a matter of “numbers and tonnage.”

Parkinson’s comparison of these figures for the years 1914 and 1928 was simple and striking. In 1914, he observed, the Royal Navy boasted 62 capital ships, was manned by 146,000 officers and men, was maintained by 57,000 dockyard workmen, and was administered by 3,249 dockyard and 2,000 Admiralty officials and clerks. By 1928, the number of capital ships had fallen to 20 and sailors to 100,000, while dockyard worker numbers had risen somewhat to a total of 62,439. Dockyard administrative personnel, on the other hand, had increased to 4,558, and their Admiralty equivalents to 3,569. Restated in percentage terms, between 1914 and 1928 capital ships in commission had decreased by some 68% and officers and men by 32%, while dockyard workers had increased by 10%, dockyard administrators by 40%, and Admiralty officials by 78% [See Table 1],

Parkinson pointed out that the increasing complexity of naval technology could not explain these changes. Such, he argued, might account for the growth in the number of dockyard workers or even the size of the staff devoted to administration, but not for the even faster expansion of Admiralty personnel, which had apparently taken place at double the rate of their dockyard equivalents. With an obvious exposed flank thus plausibly covered, and presenting a front bristling with apparently official numbers, Parkinson at first glance seems to have made a good historical case for his law. The appropriate public policy response in light of this was clear, in spite of his disclaimers to the law having no practical application: the number of government bureaucrats could be reduced drastically without diminishing administrative effectiveness.

Parkinson did not disclose the source of his statistics, and their accuracy is not beyond reproach. While the figures for the size of the Admiralty’s administrative staff for 1928 are close to those given by authoritative materials, those for 1914 are a quarter too high [See Table 2]. The lower accurate number for 1914 actually strengthens the case that Parkinson wanted to make, because the percentage increase between 1914 and 1928 as a consequence rises from 78 to 120. But while problems of evidence do not compromise Parkinson’s presentation, the same cannot be said of the shortcomings of his reasoning. Addressing this issue requires exposing Parkinson’s logic to clear inspection by restating his historical argument in the form of its three interlocking syllogisms.

• The number of Admiralty administrators in 1914 was sufficient to do what had to be done, the Admiralty had many more administrators but a much easier administrative task to perform in 1928 as compared with 1914, and therefore there were too many administrators in 1928.

• Between 1914 and 1928, when the Admiralty staff grew while its workload declined, no other force would have caused the Admiralty bureaucracy to increase in size while its workload was declining, except a tendency for its staff to expand regardless of whether there was work to be done or not. Therefore, Admiralty administrative growth between 1914 and 1928 was the result of a tendency of its staff to expand, regardless of change in work load.

• The Admiralty was an archetypical bureaucracy, Admiralty growth was the result of a tendency of its staff to expand regardless of whether there was more work to be done or not, and therefore the expansion of the administrative staffs of other bureaucracies are attributable to the same cause, namely, the action of the following law, “work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”

The weak point of the first construction was its first premise because there is good reason to believe that the number of administrators in 1914 was not sufficient to do what had to be done. From roughly the turn of the century until 1914, the expansion of the fleet, technological change, and the development of more sophisticated planning and administrative procedures generated unprecedented quantities of reports, memoranda, contracts, and other forms of writing. Financial restrictions, however, prevented the Admiralty from increasing the size of its administrative staff in anywhere near proportion. As a consequence officials were heavily overworked, resulting in the making of certain faulty policy decisions that were later to have serious operational consequences. It could be argued, therefore, that rather than the Royal Navy’s administrative manning levels of 1928 having been too high, those of 1914 were too low.

Administrative undermanning in 1914, however, does not explain why Admiralty staffs increased at a rate that was much faster than that of dockyard technical workers. The growth of the latter during the same years of the early 20th century had been as rigidly or perhaps even more rigidly restricted on financial grounds than that of the former, and in the face of what were at least comparable increases in work loads. The inadequate size of the Admiralty’s administrative staff in 1914, in other words, while probably an important factor, cannot provide a complete answer to the question of why the Admiralty’s administrative complement in 1928 so greatly exceeded that of 1914- To supply the missing balance, it is necessary to consider the second premise of the second construction.

Parkinson did not state explicitly that no other force could have caused this phenomenon, except his law. He achieved this tacitly, simply by not mentioning the existence of a cataclysmic event that had occurred between 1914 and 1928, which had disturbed, transformed, or in some cases even destroyed, virtually every major governmental institution in Europe. This momentous happening was, of course, World War I. The impact of the war on the expansion of the Admiralty had several aspects, none of which was related to the operation of Parkinson’s law.

In the first place, the serious wartime equipment failures, which were attributable in part to inadequate prewar staffing, encouraged the expansion of the naval bureaucracy. Second, certain shortcomings of the massive naval mobilization of 1914, which mistakes made by hastily assigned bureaucrats and clerks had caused, had shown that even higher manning levels than those sufficient to meet normal peacetime paperwork loads were required to provide the reserve capacity essential to efficient administrative function in an emergency. Third, the size of the Admiralty bureaucracy was swelled in the postwar era by the transfer of the Technical Costs Branch of the Ministry of Munitions to the Navy’s Contract and Purchase Department upon the disbandment of the war-created parent body. The Admiralty may have acquired individuals as well as a whole department for similar reasons.

In addition, larger forces were at work. When pressed by the Treasury before the war to replace young male clerks with less well-remunerated women typists, the Admiralty had refused. The board had concluded its reply, as the story goes, with the perhaps unfortunately worded pronouncement that “their Lordships cannot conceal their decided preference for the boys.” The enormous expansion of the Army, however, greatly increased demand for young men, which in turn overrode considerations of taste regarding the gender of those performing secretarial tasks. By January 1918, the Admiralty had come to employ some 2,256 women, which was more than half the number of its civilian clerical workforce.

Postwar personnel lists of the Admiralty departments, unlike their wartime predecessors, do not make clear distinctions between positions held by men as opposed to women, which indicates that what had at first been considered exceptional and perhaps temporary had, after extended practice during the war, become accepted as normal even for peace. In any case, although no exact estimate can at this time be made of the gender balance of the Admiralty administrative apparatus in 1928, it is certain that many of the civilian clerical workers were women. The effect of this change from prewar practice on the costs of administration was probably substantial.

Admiralty pay rates have yet to be the subject of scholarly investigation. The known expenditure on the Admiralty’s civilian workforce and size of that workforce in 1914 and 1928, however, can provide the basis for instructive computations. When the former numbers are divided by the latter, and the quotient for 1928 corrected for the effects of inflation, the results show a fall in the average per capita cost of administration by more than one-fourth [See Table 3]. This is explained easily by the fact that 89% of the Admiralty’s administrative personnel increase between 1914 and 1928 consisted of civilian clerical workers, as opposed to naval officers or civilian bureaucrats [See Table 2]. Women made up a large proportion if not a large majority of this, and their lower wages would depress the average per capita cost of administration in the manner shown by the calculations. And the decline in labor cost may have encouraged rising numbers.

Alternatively, reductions in labor cost may simply have offset the financial impact of Admiralty administrative personnel increases made necessary by a fundamental change in the economic nature of great power conflict that happened during World War I. What had begun in 1914 as a confrontation between armies was transformed by the onset of military stalemate on the continent into a contest of industrial economies that lasted four years. In Britain, the need to maintain simultaneously the world’s largest navy and build up what had been one of Europe’s smallest armies into a force comparable in size to that of a first- class military power posed difficult problems of economic allocation. As demand for raw materials, labor, and manufacturing plant for naval and military purposes began to outrun availability, the Admiralty found itself engaged in a bitter struggle for control over industrial supply with the army’s procurement agent, the Ministry of Munitions.

Statistics show a direct correlation between the growth in the size of the Admiralty’s civilian clerical workforce and the expansion of a similar force in the Ministry of Munitions. During the first year-and-a-half of war, the Navy—whose ships were for the most part built, men in service, and connections with British heavy industry long established—found access to industrial assets relatively easy, because the Army was preoccupied with the induction and training of hundreds of thousands of men and lacked experience with large-scale industrial procurement from private contractors. In the absence of serious competition, the Admiralty had simply to place orders with major contractors, whose subsequent relations with sub-contractors were their own affair. During this period, the increase in the size of the Admiralty’s civilian bureaucracy was relatively small, the total rise by January 1916 coming to little more than 20% [See Table 4].

From 1916 onward, however, the operations of the Ministry of Munitions, which had been created in the summer of 1915 to meet the Army’s large and increasing requirements for armaments of all description, began to threaten seriously the Admiralty’s access to the nation’s industrial production. Ministry of Munitions control over the war economy was extended through a system of procurement based on formal contracting at all levels of material supply and production, a process that generated an enormous quantity of paperwork that in turn required a commensurate expansion of bureaucracy. In the first quarter of 1916, the Ministry of Munitions headquarters staff was nearly 5,000, or probably three times the number at the Admiralty. By the end of the war, this figure had grown to more than 25,000. Most were clerical personnel, who were needed to administer communications with hundreds of firms, both large and small, engaged in war work.

To maintain the Navy’s access to industrial suppliers, the Admiralty had no alternative but to develop a comparable instrument of direction. Over the course of 1916, the personnel of the navy departments concerned with industrial logistical matters—which contained most of the Admiralty’s clerical workers—more than tripled. By January 1918, the number of Admiralty clerical personnel was nearly quintuple the figure at the beginning of 1916, thus matching almost exactly in proportion the growth of the Ministry of Munitions [See Table 4]. Royal Navy consumption of British industrial war production during the last three years of the war not only continued to expand in absolute terms, but as a percentage of total output as well. This probably would not have occurred had the Admiralty failed to develop an effective counter to the encroachments of the paper-processing battalions of the Ministry of Munitions.

The expansion of Admiralty administration might have been an act of “defensive bureaucratization,” that is, a change in administrative organization and practice in response to the threat to vital interests posed by a rival administrative entity. The potential intensity of interservice economic rivalry in any future protracted hostilities, moreover, had been amplified greatly by the formation of a separate air force and the mechanization of the Army, whose combined consumption of Britain’s armaments capacity was bound in the event of another major war to exceed greatly that of the air and land forces of the last. The Navy thus had good reason to believe that in the next struggle it would face even stiffer resistance from the army and air force when it came to industrial logistics. Thus, a large administrative workforce had to be kept in place, ready to fight and win the paper conflict upon which the successful maintenance of British naval procurement would surely depend.

There can, in sum, be little doubt that World War I exerted a powerful influence on the growth of the Admiralty bureaucracy in different ways. The various elements of the analysis leading to that conclusion work against both the first and second premises of Parkinson’s third syllogism: the Admiralty hardly can be considered a standard model—at least insofar as bureaucratic expansion is concerned—given the military and historical particularity of the major forces at play between 1914 and 1928. The operation of these same forces, moreover, offers a more plausible explanation of Admiralty administrative growth than that provided by Parkinson’s law. And this suggests that the causes of expanding bureaucracy in the 20th century are not singular and simple, but multiple and complex. These eventually may be discovered and codified, but such statutes as yet await the labor of their historian legislators.

In one sense, however, the story of Admiralty administrative expansion may well be revealing of one familiar form of archetypical institutional behavior. Bureaucracies, as much of the foregoing has suggested, have important political as well as administrative functions. The fulfillment of those functions may require increases in paperwork over and above those generated by purely administrative necessities. Students of the affairs of great states know the fundamental law describing this general phenomenon: “Almost everything is political, and politics matters.”