Incongruity Between Bureaucracy and Society in Developing Nations: A Critique

Abstract

In most developing countries, there exists an “overdeveloped” bureaucratic apparatus inherited as a colonial legacy and expanded through imitative postcolonial reforms, while the political, economic, and cultural realms remain largely underdeveloped. As a result, there is a certain incongruity between bureaucracy and society in these countries, which has serious implications for their socioeconomic progress. However, the existing literature focuses mainly on the structural and procedural issues of postcolonial bureaucracy, and contains very limited discourse on this mismatch between the bureaucratic apparatus and the overall social formation. This article attempts to explicate the nature and dimensions of this bureaucracy‐society incongruity, analyze its adverse implications for socioeconomic development, and offer some remedial policy alternatives for consideration.

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