Adolescent Bureaucracy
There's a good interview with William Langewiesche of The Atlantic Monthly by The Atlantic Monthly. Christopher Hitchens aside, Langewiesche is probably my favourite writer of short non-fiction at the moment. The interview is about the subject of his latest article for the magazine—unfortunately not a available online which is available online [via peterme.com]—about the breakup of the space shuttle Columbia, and article I can recommend. If NASA or even bureaucratic politics is your thing, then I can wholeheartedly recommend the article. (Your public library probably has a copy of the magazine. It's in the November issue.)
From the interview:
Q: What is it about NASA that discourages dissent?
A: That's a very complicated question. All large organizations do. NASA is astonishingly bureaucratic. I'm sure that people who are in the business of studying the sociology of large organizations would put it in a certain age group; it's sort of a young adult or an adolescent bureaucracy. It's at a certain stage in its development where the initial energies and camaraderie and ability to communicate and sense of mission—all that's disappeared. And it's not yet in the really mature stage, like the U.S. military is right now, where they've been able to work through a lot of these problems. I've been impressed by the Army, specifically, in my dealings with them in Bosnia and Kosovo, by the way communication does work within that organization. I mean, yeah, the Army is famously stupid, and there's the right way and the wrong way and the Army way and all this stuff… but in fact in the larger organization they've worked through a lot of problems. NASA hasn't done that.
