Season 5, Episode 10 of The Office is entitled “The Surplus.” In it, accountant Oscar Martinez finds a surplus of $4,300 in the office’s budget. After revealing this surplus to boss Michael Scott, the office workers spend the episode arguing how best to spend those $4,300. Hilarity ensues. While the office in question is not a bureaucracy as strictly defined in class, the opening scene suggests there are some bureaucratic elements to the business of Dunder Mifflin, Scranton.
A few of the assumptions laid out my Niskanen are satisfied by the expressed goals of Mr. Martinez and Mr. Scott. First of all, Oscar’s statements imply that they want to have as big a budget as possible next year, satisfying assumption one (maximize budget). Next, in the lemonade stand analogy presented by Oscar, he suggests hiding the true costs from the upper levels of the business. If Michael and Oscar are successfully able to hide the true costs from the CFO, assumption three (true costs known only to senior bureaucrat) has been satisfied. Additionally, Oscar says, “we have to spend [the surplus] by the end of the day or it will be deducted from next year’s budget.” This implies the office wants to use all of their budget, which fulfills assumption five (use all their budget). Assumption two is a little difficult to analyze in this context, and I don’t think assumption four holds. Nonetheless, there are certainly some bureaucratic elements of the Dunder Mifflin, Scranton. The manager and his accountants serve as the senior bureaucrat, and the CFO and board of the company essentially act as the legislators. This likely helps explain some of the inefficiency and economic slack this office is known for in the show (see this parkour example).
1 comment:
Hey Lewis,
Thanks for your post, I thought it was really creative and a good example of bureaucratic budget maximization outside of a strictly bureaucratic context. I think you could even go further by thinking about other models of bureaucracy, specifically the Dunleavy model. The Dunleavy model is consistent with the Niskanen model on the first four assumptions: bureau policies are set by bureaucrats; governments rely on bureaus to report their costs; governments rely on bureaus to report the value they can create at a given level of output; and that bureaucrats maximize their personal utilities, but it adds two more. These are that a bureau’s behavior is determined by a combination of decisions made by many officials (not just the senior bureaucrat), which could result in an outcome favored by no officials, and that those officials with a higher rank have a higher level of influence on bureau policy.
Relating this to your example of The Office, we can think of Mr. Scott and Mr. Martinez as two high level officials with Mr. Scott as the senior bureaucrat. Mr. Martinez, as the head accountant, knows the true cost of operating Dunder Mifflin and has a significant amount of influence in office policy. Yet in the episode, neither actually gets what they want. Mr. Martinez wants a new copier for the office and Mr. Scott wants to trade in the money for a bonus, but many other members of the bureaucracy want new chairs. In the end, Mr. Scott tells the whole office to vote on it, showing that he has a high level of influence on bureau policy as the senior bureaucrat (assumption 6). After the vote (each vote being a decision made by an official of the bureaucracy), the decision comes back that the $4,300 will be used to buy new chairs for the office. In this case, neither of the high level officials got the outcome they wanted, which is consistent with assumption 5.
https://www.facebook.com/DunderMifflinMeme/videos/im-gonna-need-4jim-might-be-a-low-key-christian-grey-when-him-and-pam-get-home-5/238508600423260/
I think that the Dunleavy model lends extra credence to your point!
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