Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

184 Public Management and Administration
officials and scribes of all sorts. The body of officials actively engaged in a ‘public’
office, along with the respective apparatus of material implements and the files, make up
a ‘bureau’.
The ‘scribes’ and the ‘apparatus of material implements and the files’ refer to the
technology then available, with the office being the repository of the files. The
files store information; these are required to record precedents so that the agency
makes the same decision when circumstances are the same as an earlier occasion,
and to process claims for benefits such as pensions.
For many years the system worked well, helped perhaps by relatively few
major changes in office technology at least until late in the twentieth century.
The photocopier was a major advance over the carbon copy, as were such
instruments as conference telephone calls, but these were refinements rather
than developments requiring totally different organizational systems. Even if
the nineteenth-century equipment now seems rather primitive, it was a very big
jump from what had been there previously. The telegraph and telephone were
revolutionary when they were invented, as was the typewriter. It was only when
the widespread use of interlinked computers within government became common
that a further revolution took place. Earlier changes could be incorporated
into the agency with little effect on power structures or the way the office was
organized.
From the 1960s governments became assiduous users of computers, but in a
limited way. Computing was regarded as a separate activity within an agency,
staffed by experts, but operated in a way analogous to a typing pool. The early
use of computers had little impact on organizations, as they were introduced in
ways that reinforced existing boundaries, as Bellamy and Taylor argue (1998,
p. 11):
Here, in these early days of government computing, was affirmation by machine of the
centralized forms of bureaucratic organization which prevailed at the time. The mainframe
computer was being used to process data which had central, corporate functionality.
It offered no challenge to the hierarchical and centralized structures by which it was
surrounded. Indeed, its effect was to sustain and even to reinforce those features of largescale
bureaucracy. Its reason for being was simple automation; the accomplishment of
large-scale data processing tasks at lower costs than hitherto.
The information and communications revolution changed that. Only when
technology became distributed with personal computers on every desk, as has
become common within government, combined with intranets and access to
the Internet, has there been any serious impact on organizational structures. As
Seneviratne argues (1999, p. 45):
The public sector’s conservative approach to its use of ICT began to change in the 1990s.
With new software applications and more powerful hardware, the old inflexible technologies
of the prior decades were replaced by more flexible systems that relied on networks
and new methods of electronic communication. Technologies such as electronic