The topic today is bureaucracy and its role within the organization. Or maybe I should say the organization, bureaucracy, and the role of bureaucracy within the organization.
About twelve years ago, I decided that my research center should do more applied work. Now, when things are within my control, we can bring people to the lab, we can test things, we can maybe buy a vending machine or do a small experiment here. But if I want to do an experiment with a bank or with a hospital or with an insurance company, I need some collaborations. This was, I think, the biggest promise of behavioral economics—not just to do things in the lab, but to do things in the real world.
Imagine a hospital setting. Imagine we want to do a study on how to get people to check out when they should. Or do their physical therapy after they check out. Or imagine that we want people to be admitted for surgery after they really haven’t smoked (if you smoke before surgery, the surgery cannot take place because nicotine changes blood flow). Big things like that. With the blessing of two provosts ago, we decided to do a center for applied research using behavioral economics to change behavior in health and financial decision-making. This provost was the provost who hired me, Peter Lange, an unbelievable guy.
As time marched on, one thing that happened were lots of new rules about privacy were created. And I think that privacy is mixed, but for research it became a real challenge. Because if I do research with a hospital, how do we maintain privacy? Universities are always, of course, afraid of violating privacy. They’re afraid somebody will sue them for violating privacy. So, lawyers became involved and created things like a data transfer agreement, which is very clear that they won’t send any identifying information, etc. And we start working within these contracts. This shifts the goal not to promote science but to avoid potential lawsuits. The focus is no longer about how we get more useful data; it’s about how we don’t get sued. Perfectly understandable.
But then the university tells us that we are doing too much research. We’re working with too many outside partners, and the university can’t handle the load. Now, I understood that and so we reduced the load and started doing fewer experiments. But it took me a while to understand that if somebody came to me and told me to do more research, I would have been delighted. That’s my mission. That’s why I’m here. But when we needed the administrators at Duke to do more work on these collaborations so we could produce more research, they were not interested.
We have the research side, my job. We have the bureaucratic side, their job. And they understood that their job got bigger. But because their role got bigger and more complex because of the privacy laws, their response was, for us to do less. In the beginning, I just accepted it. Because we are a joint function. But the reality is that the mission of a university is not for bureaucrats to do less work. It’s not for bureaucrats to have fewer projects. The mission of a university is to produce more research. Nowhere on the mission statement, does it say that research should decrease as privacy rules and legal documents required to do field research become more complex.
Two things: Bureaucrats don’t really share the mission of the university. That’s one. And the second is that they don’t like the work that they do. I understand, by the way, I wouldn’t like it either. But because they don’t like the work they do, they want to do the minimum possible. And they look at everyone who gives them more work as an enemy. How did we get to a place where there’s a part of an organization that doesn’t share the goal of the organization and doesn’t want to do any of the work that it’s supposed to be doing?
Very bizarre, but I guess that’s bureaucracy.
