Yet India's poor are not disenfranchised; they actively participate in the democratic project.

For basic text/supplement use in Bureaucracy, Public Administration, Organization Theory, Policy Implementation, and American Government courses. Demonstrating our need to think more deeply about our dissatisfactions with bureaucracy, this proactive text combines original explanations of bureaucratic red tape with prescription and case examples challenging students to develop a deeper understanding of bureaucracy as a set of trade-offs among politics, accountability and efficiency. Fair-minded in approach, it distinguishes bureaucratic "normalities" from bureaucratic pathologies in the internal and inter-organizational management of organizations helping students discern the difference between which rules and regulations are reasonable accountability or coordination mechanisms, and which, in fact, can be labeled "red tape".

This work includes a brief history of skyscrapers as well as chapters on elevators and communications, facades and facing, mechanical and electrical systems, forces of nature, and much more.

Death, taxes, and red tape. The inevitable trio no one can escape. That wry sense of reality colors Herbert Kaufman's classic study of red tape, the bureaucratic phenomenon that all of us have encountered in some form—from the confounding tax form filled out annually to the maddeningly time-consuming wait at the driver's license bureau. The complaints about red tape, Kaufman concedes, are legion. It's messy, it takes too long, it lacks local knowledge, it is out of date, it makes insane demands, it increases costs, it slows progress. It is, in short, a burden and many times there is no measurable positive outcome. Kaufman takes us on an unblinking tour of the dismal landscape of red tape. But he also shows us another side of red tape, one we often forget. Red tape is how government protects us from tainted food, shoddy products, and unfair labor practices. It guarantees a social safety net for the elderly, the disabled, children, veterans, and victims of natural disasters. One person's red tape is another person's protection. This reissue is a Brookings Classic, a series of republished books for readers to revisit or discover, notable works by the Brookings Institution Press.

This book is about the smallest unit of public policy: the government transaction. Government transactions—requesting a birth certificate, registering a property, or opening a business, for example—are the way that citizens and companies connect with the government. Efficient transactions enhance the business climate, citizen perception of government, and access to crucial public programs and services. In Latin America and the Caribbean, however, government transactions are often headaches. Public institutions rarely coordinate with each other, still rely on paper, and are more concerned about fulfilling bureaucratic requirements than meeting citizens’ needs. Wait No More empirically confirms a reality known anecdotally but previously unquantified and offers a path to escape the bureaucratic maze.