![]() Much of the essay is dedicated to a summary of purportedly scientific observations supporting the law, such as the increase in the number of employees at the Colonial Office while the British Empire declined (he showed that it had its greatest number of staff when it was folded into the Foreign Office due to a lack of colonies to administer). He derived the dictum from his extensive experience in the British Civil Service.Ī current form of the law is not the one to which Parkinson referred by that name in the article, but rather a mathematical equation describing the rate at which bureaucracies expand over time. It was translated into many languages as the law seemed to apply in other countries too.Īrticulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as part of the first sentence of an essay published in The Economist in 1955 and since republished online, it was reprinted with other essays in the book Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress (London, John Murray, 1958). The essay was then published with other similar essays as a successful book: Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress. The growth was presented mathematically with the formula x=(2k m+P)/n in which k was the number of officials wanting subordinates, m was the hours they spent writing minutes to each other and so on. He gave, as examples, the growth in the size of the British Admiralty and Colonial Office even though the numbers of their ships and colonies were declining. Northcote Parkinson as an essay in The Economist. It was first published in 1955 by the naval historian C. This was attributed mainly to two factors: that officials want subordinates, not rivals, and that officials make work for each other. Parkinson's law is the observation that public administration, bureaucracy and officialdom expands, regardless of the amount of work to be done. Not to be confused with Parkinson's law of triviality.
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