Sociology, as a broad and multifaceted science, views the realities in society in their complexity. Various phenomena occurring in social structures might be analyzed using sociological theories and concepts that provide rationalization and explanation of human actions within social systems. The social phenomenon of bureaucracy has been meticulously portrayed in the documentary created by Donald Brittain in 1979, entitled Paperland: The bureaucrat observed. The film criticizes bureaucratic systems that prevail in civil service institutions around the world. Using the sarcastic and ironic style of narration, the commentator addresses the absurdity of bureaucracy, the inertia, and the futility of the system within which bureaucrats perform useless actions calling them responsible jobs.
The documentary incorporates cases from a variety of cities of the world where the same patterns of red tape actions are observed on a permanent basis. The absurdity of the roles performed by bureaucrats is illustrated by a civil servant standing near a man with a shovel and instructing him where to dig and how deep (Brittain, 1979). Similarly, a board of pension committee decision-makers convenes a formal meeting to decide whether their employee’s infarction occurred during or after the working shift when determining the size of a widow’s pension (Brittain, 1979). The director of the documentary argues that behind such excessive paperwork and hierarchal overcomplicated decision-making processes, true virtues and moral values of human life are disregarded.
Indeed, in the film, young student bureaucrats are introduced as those whose achievements will be assessed on the basis of their compliance with the bureaucratic norms and rules. The commentator states that “they will not be judged on whether or not they have promoted truth over falsehood, love over hate, joy over despair; they will be judged solely on whether or not they have followed proper procedure” (Brittain, 1979, 00:19:52 – 00:20:05). Thus, bureaucracy is a persistent system that forces people to approach their individual concerns to form the perspective of
In the documentary, it is portrayed how people must comply with the imposed rules and norms of bureaucracy. This assertion might be theorized from the perspective of Durkheim’s (1982) explanation of social facts and how they manifest in human lives. According to the sociologist, any human action is perceived from the perspective of its match to social or legal norms. Therefore, if one attempts “to violate the rules of law they react against [one] so as to forestall [one’s] action” or “make [one’s] action conform to the norm if it is capable of being reversed” (Durkheim, 1982, p. 51). In such a manner, any aspect of human life, ranging from birth, employment, immigration, and the repairmen of an elevator, obtaining a pension, or dying, are social facts that comply with bureaucratic norms.
Another aspect of bureaucracy portrayed in the documentary is the civil service as a larger system, with the forces with which all individuals should comply. Such a perspective might be best explained using Mills’ (2000) theory of sociological imagination. To comprehend one’s behaviors and explain their causes, one should put their individual case in a larger social context. In such a manner, from the point of view of the omnipresence of bureaucracy, people should always refer to authorities in the bureaucratic offices to justify their actions. However, while social imagination helps people conceptualize, contextualize, and comprehend social issues of all sorts, bureaucracy diminishes human beings to senseless creatures, any manifestation of the existence of which might be documented and sealed.
Moreover, another significant sociological aspect portrayed in the documentary is the personality of a typical bureaucrat. Brittain (1979) calls this species homos bureaucrats, implying a non-emotional, pragmatic, unambitious person without charisma or compassion that follows the rules blindly. The ultimate resort for these people is paperwork, documents in which the instructions and norms for every action are provided. The abundance of such workers, the lack of necessity of their work, implied conflicts, and replication of meaningless procedures might be theorized from the perspectives of Graeber (2018), who labeled such occupations “bullshit jobs” (p. 1). Vividly describing a situation coinciding with the many cases shown in the documentary, Graeber (2018) discusses the absurdity of the job of the German military. His task is to fill in forms and sign papers, formalizing such simple actions as moving a table to a different department.
In addition, humoristic elements in the movie, such as the repairmen of the elevator or instructions on how to dig, are complemented by a case of a Spanish civil servant introduced by Graeber (2018). The man did not come to his office for six years, got his salary, and his absence was not even noticed during those years. Thus, these examples illustrate how bureaucracy is absurd and that it reduces social life manifestations to measurable and controllable norms regardless of the moral and ethical aspects of human existence. The reasons for the emergence of bureaucracy were related to the need for control and an overview of social interactions. However, the way it is implemented and how people perform within this absurd system demonstrate the lack of rational basis for hierarchal red tape conventional norms that predetermine absurdist social structures.
References
Brittain, D. (1979). Paperland: The bureaucrat observed. National Film Board of Canada.
Durkheim, E. (1982). What is a social fact? In The rules of sociological method (pp. 50-59). The Free Press.
Graeber, D. (2018). What is a bullshit job? In Bullshit Jobs: A theory (pp. 1-26). Simon & Schuster.
Mills, C. W. (2000). The promise. In The sociological imagination (pp. 3-11). Oxford University Press.