What Leads to Administrative Bloat?

I’ve commented many times before on this blog about runaway expenditure on management resulting in the diversion of resources away from the core missions of a university, i.e. teaching and research, while producing no significant improvement in the efficiency, and indeed often a deterioration, of administrative processes. David Graeber wrote a book called Bullshit Jobs about this phenomenon. Management response to this is generally to assert that this administrative bloat is a response to regulatory burden. Many of us working in higher education would instead argue that the entire sector has been hijacked by self-serving parasites who are deliberately sucking the lifeblood out of the system. I just came across a paper on the Physics and Society section of arXiv that tries to explain management bloat from the point of view of systems theory. The title is What Leads to Administrative Bloat? A Dynamic Model of Administrative Cost and Waste, the authors are Vicky Chuqiao Yang and Levi…