Christopher Logan

Sociology, it has been truly observed, is the useless science: half its teachings are a clumsy wrestle with the self-evident; the rest are merely false. Thus we find its practitioners more concerned to interrogate hapless slum dwellers and to gabble of “autochthonous play” than to make known the laws of human conduct. (It is noteworthy that those men whom we call “great” sociologists—e.g., Sumner, Sorokin—have been authentic social philosophers: great in the degree by which they transcend the discipline.) In the default of these self-styled scientists, it is lucky that some “insightful” non-sociologists remain who can instruct us in the behavior of human groups.

Just such a free intelligence is the author of Parkinson’s Law and Other Studies in Administration (Houghton Mifflin, $3.00). C. Northcote Parkinson, by all accounts, is “Raffles Professor of History” at the University of Malaya—which sounds too improbable to be invention. He first sank his satirical harpoon into the bureaucratic flank in November 1955, when he expounded his original “law” in the pages of the London Economist. Setting forth the geometry of bureaucratic expansion, “Parkinson’s Law” is a paradigm of balanced prose and civilized spoofing. Through a variety of mathematical demonstrations, Parkinson “proves” that bureaucracies (irrespective of the amount of work to be accomplished) grow at a rate of “between 5.17 per cent and 6.56 per cent” annually—the chief reason being that the bureaucrat, to feed his sense of self-importance and to avoid the hazards of competition, always hires two assistants, who will battle each other instead of battling him. In due time, the two assistants will each hire two other assistants, and so on.

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Sociology, it has been truly observed, is the useless science: half its teachings are a clumsy wrestle with the self-evident; the rest are merely false. Thus we find its practitioners more concerned to interrogate hapless slum dwellers and to gabble of “autochthonous play” than to make known the laws of human conduct. (It is noteworthy that those men whom we call “great” sociologists—e.g., Sumner, Sorokin—have been authentic social philosophers: great in the degree by which they transcend the discipline.) In the default of these self-styled scientists, it is lucky that some “insightful” non-sociologists remain who can instruct us in the behavior of human groups.

Just such a free intelligence is the author of Parkinson’s Law and Other Studies in Administration (Houghton Mifflin, $3.00). C. Northcote Parkinson, by all accounts, is “Raffles Professor of History” at the University of Malaya—which sounds too improbable to be invention. He first sank his satirical harpoon into the bureaucratic flank in November 1955, when he expounded his original “law” in the pages of the London Economist. Setting forth the geometry of bureaucratic expansion, “Parkinson’s Law” is a paradigm of balanced prose and civilized spoofing. Through a variety of mathematical demonstrations, Parkinson “proves” that bureaucracies (irrespective of the amount of work to be accomplished) grow at a rate of “between 5.17 per cent and 6.56 per cent” annually—the chief reason being that the bureaucrat, to feed his sense of self-importance and to avoid the hazards of competition, always hires two assistants, who will battle each other instead of battling him. In due time, the two assistants will each hire two other assistants, and so on.