Stumbled across an entry posted by Rick Hills earlier today on PrawfsBlawg that asks, “What do bureaucrats want?” In brief, he notes that academics—particularly “economically oriented ones”—seem to assume that bureaucrats are primarily after power, and he questions that assumption.

I agree with him.  I don’t think bureaucrats are always after power, or even that most bureaucrats want power.  However, the ones we have our stickiest and most unjust encounters with are almost always the ones who do want, and often have, power, so they are of course the ones to whom most attention is paid.

The bureaucrats who, to take one of Hills’ examples, are time-servers who like the quiet life, or who find satisfaction in quietly providing competent-to-excellent service to their constituents—those folks aren’t going to get much if any press at all, nor much if any academic studies conducted on who they are and what they want.

In this culture—and most others, I would think, but certainly not all—the people who get the most attention across the board are the people who cause the most trouble.  From family life and personal relationships to classrooms to coworkers, and so on and so on.

The quiet, well-behaved child gets ignored while parents pull their hair out trying to figure out how to deal with the problem child.  Parents and teachers and school counselors and principals have meetings with and about the problem student, while the quiet kid who makes good grades can get lost in the shuffle.  How many nose-to-the-grindstone lawmakers do we have in this country, who do solid, good work year in and year out without a lot of hoopla, whose quiet good work doesn’t get the same column inches in the local papers that are given to the ones  who are caught up in scandal?  Higher ed academics are no different—economically oriented or not, as far as I can tell—and give the lion’s share of attention to the trouble-makers.  In the wonderful world of bureaucracy, that means it goes to power-wielding, power-abusing, and power-hungry bureaucrats.

I understand this focus, from a psychologist’s perspective, since therapists of all stripes are involved in defining human problems and finding ways to correct or diminish them.  In recent years, however, there’s been something of a shift in psychology, which I hope continues and grows.  It’s a shift to pay attention to what’s positive in human life and experience, so as to find ways of building upon the positive.  What’s positive can increase in both those ways–focusing on the negative to reduce it, and building on the positive to increase it.

I will hope that the positive psychology shift not only grows in the discipline of psychology, but that it spills over into other realms, including the bureaucratic, as well.  Then maybe one day Rick Hills can have some very different academic papers to comment on for us.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen