Fall and rise of control
From Cyberlaw
There seem to be two main aims of control processes. The first one lays in verifying efficiency and effectiveness of the structure, stimulating enhancements of the weakest elements and rewarding the strongest ones. Second is retaining (regaining) legitimacy. Both are vital for the very existence of each structure.
Control operates centripetally, providing structural coordination and uniformity. But control in bureaucratic structures is flawed in several respects. Anthony Downs, who explored the issue profoundly (Anthony Downs, Inside Bureaucracy (Scott Foresman & Co, 1967)), found several regularities which he called “laws”: 1. Law of Hierarchy: coordination of large-scale activities without markets requires a hierarchical authority structure; 2. Law of Imperfect Control: no one can fully control the behavior of a large organization; 3. Law of Diminishing Control: the larger any organization becomes, the weaker is the control over its actions exercised by those at the top; 4. Law of Decreasing Coordination: the larger any organization becomes, the poorer is the coordination among its actions; 5. Power Shift Law: unrestrained conflict shifts power upward; 6. Law of Progress through Imperialism: the desire to aggrandize breads innovation The law of Counter Control: the greater the effort made by a sovereign or top-level official to control the behavior of subordinate officials, the greater the efforts made by those subordinates to evade or counteract such control (pp. 147, 262-263).
Can technology help in inverting the trend towards loosing control? Can it substantially stimulate civic examination of government and public officials? (Fountain: 2001, 35) provides an illuminating description of a design pertinent particularly to complex and disperse but centralized systems: “data collected at remote field locations, once digitized, can be as easily available at headquarters as in its field locations and may be easily transferred without going through several layers of hierarchy… Similarly, information generated at headquarters can be easily transferred to and enhance the activities of field locations. Telecommunications networks, increasingly linked to the Internet and web, allow bureaucracies to centralize some tasks and decentralize others. The design challenge is to structure field units to maximize the benefits of local knowledge while using centralized systems to maintain control and prevent redundancy.” On many levels information is generated, shared by many. It is easily accessible and an access to information prerequisites control. But multipoint generation risks in bringing about the information glut.
Some do not share this concern. James Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Harvard University Press, [1986] 1989): 15 claimed that preprocessing is a mode for decreasing the ammount of information to be processed in the control process. The idea is simple—if you use software embidding information which needs to be taken into consideration in coordination and control processes, then the information is incorporated in the control process by default and you co not have to bother about it anymore. Really an evocative idea. (Fountain: 2001, 42) upheld it and couched in historiographic terms: “During the twentieth century, the bureaucratic state moved from direct supervisory control to bureaucratic control and now, in information-based organizations, is moving to embedded control”. The embedded control, according to Fountain, is intrinsically related to the “immense ability of ICT to monitor, capture, and display employee activities” (Fountain: 2001, 187). A major obstacle for the embeddedness, however, lies in the decision context, which varies from one decision to another, and cannot be preprogrammed. Circumstances inexistent in one case may be crucial for decisionmaking at another time. This substantially unresolved problem of defining the information set to have it appropriately incorporated into software does not vindicate the preprogramming claim and its potentially salutary effects on the information glut caused by control systems suffused by dispersedly generated information.
So we are back to the problem of information glut or the problem that more information within a hierarchical structure puts a heavy burden of ingesting it by controllers. More staff and staff (more bureaucracy) is a conventional solution. But there may be another solution—furthering transparency of governmental actions and therefore dispersing control itself. After all, every democracy should strive toward what Abraham Lincoln called “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”. Within the contemporary discussion someone noticed that "the bureaucratic spirit corrupts character and engenders moral poverty" ("Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, Trans. By Eden and Cedar Paul, intro. Saymour Martin Lipset, (The Free Press, 1968): 191). But this nasty animal may be very useful as long as it does not go free. It needs harness fittinmg tight.
As any control in the purview of legal system is inherently extraneous, it inevitably leads to structural resistance. The more efficient it is, the less welcome it becomes. And absolutely external control of media, fuelled by enhanced transparency of government bureaucracy, is a sheer recipe for institutional backlash.
