Reasonable Time and Real Time in Administrative Procedure

• Published date: 01 May 1972
• Date: 01 May 1972
• Author: Peter Savage,Hans H. Jecht
• DOI: 10.1177/009539977200400104
• Subject Matter: Articles

REASONABLE TIME AND REAL
TIME IN ADMINISTRA TIVE
PROCED URE
HANS H. JECHT
Munich, Germany
PETER SA VA GE
University of New Hampshire
In his novel The Law (Yor dem Gesetz), Franz Kafka tells us
the story of a man from the country who wishes to be
admitted to The Law. He finds a doorkeeper in front the The
Law, who refuses to admit him. Asked whether he will grant
permission to enter later, the doorkeeper answers: &dquo;That is
possible.&dquo; &dquo;The Law is supposed to be always accessible to
everyone,&dquo; the man from the country reflects. He finds,
however, he must wait until he is given permission to enter.
So he waits for permission, days lengthening into months and
months into years, until finally he grows old and childish.
Before he dies he asks the doorkeeper one last question: &dquo;It
is said that everyone strives after The Law, how is it that
during these many years, no one except me has asked to be
admitted?&dquo; &dquo;No one else could have been admitted here,&dquo; is
the answer, &dquo;as this door was intended solely for you. Now I
am
going to close it.&dquo;’
The purpose of this brief essay is to consider some of the
temporal aspects of the bureaucracy’s relationship to the
individual and to speculate on developments of this rela-
tionship on the way to further &dquo;modernization.&dquo; Centrally
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and specifically we are interested in the temporal aspects of
&dquo;confrontation&dquo; between individual and administration. We
shall thus focus on what is seemingly a small part of the total
&dquo;picture&dquo; of time, administration, and development. But we
judge it to be a very important part.
There can be little doubt that, in developed countries,
time-its pressure, its use, its control-is of the greatest
importance to the individual. The &dquo;temporal dimension&dquo;
relates intimately to his creature comforts, to his enjoyment
of abstract rights and privileges, and to his expectations and
hopes for his life as a whole. The temporal relationships
between individual and bureaucracy thus are of prime
importance. To know this, we need not go to Kafka, though
it has never been characterized in such a masterful way as by
him. For Kafka the relationship between bureaucracy and the
individual was one of generalized conflict: Kafka was caught
helplessly and hopelessly in bureaucratic systems (see Dia-
mant, 1962: 60). In this paper, however, the conflict will be
stressed only as far as it concerns the individual’s situation
vis-~-vis bureaucratic behavior &dquo;in time.&dquo;
THE SMALL TEMPORAL CONCERNS
&dquo;In the grand sweep of human history the small temporal
concerns are trivial and indeed come close to the thin edge of
banality&dquo; (Moore, 1963: 4). As this indicates, most of the
concern with the temporal is with the &dquo;grand sweep,&dquo; with
major trends, with the general process &dquo;over time.&dquo; Certainly
there is little attention on the part of social scientists to the
matter to which we wish to address ourselves here.
However, to speak of the &dquo;small temporal concerns&dquo; of
individuals may be justified, as time pressure has become a
significant aspect of bureaucratic systems, and of life in such
systems and with such systems. This time pressure pervades
our whole life; living under time pressure is being taken more

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[89]
and more for granted as a dimension of human existence in
the highly organized &dquo;developed&dquo; countries. Indeed, this time
pressure seems to foreclose any discussion, any consideration,
of how it has come about and what might be done about it
(Luhmann, 1968: 3).
The importance of time pressure-i.e., great emphasis upon
and attention to timing-for the functioning of large-scale
organizations has been noted frequently (see, e.g., March and
Simon, 1958: 154; Merton, n.d.: 561). It is, indeed, hard to
imagine any aspect of the administrative process where the
time factor is not involved. On the other hand, any individual
who has to do with such bureaucratic systems will have to
cope with time pressure on his side. He will always have
certain time expectations which may not and probably will
not be congruent with the administration’s capacity-i.e., the
time-oriented sequence of decision-making-in handling &dquo;his&dquo;
case. In fact, it has been noted that it is exactly this
distortion of the claims on time of different subsystems, this
lack of congruency between the &dquo;time horizons&dquo; (or time
tables) of such systems, which gives rise to scarcity of time
(Luhmann, 1968: 14).
Scarcity of time in private life is symbolized by waiting
periods. To the individual, waiting for administrative action
will mean time delays, private expectations which are not
covered by public bureaucratic behavior. Since the temporal
dimension of public action can thus be a source of conflicts
between bureaucracy and individual, one would like to know
more about the dimensions and impact of the notion of
waiting. Unfortunately, however, there are no data available
that could give us a glimpse of how much time an average
person would have to spend waiting for bureaucratic action
during his lifetime, and, as a more general matter, how much
time is generally consumed by handling affairs between
individuals and public bureaucracies.
We know, however, of great differences that can be
observed from country to country. A trivial affair such as the

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application for a driver’s license, may not take more than one
hour in the United States, but in some European countries it
can take from one to six months. The &dquo;technical&dquo; question
(the registration of a person, and his or her examination of
the capacity to drive a car), of course, will not greatly differ
from country to country. What is different is the temporal
dimension of bureaucratic procedure. The results are varying
waiting periods of different impact on the individual appli-
cants.
THE MEANING OF DELAY
Kafka called the man who waited before the door to be
admitted to The Law a &dquo;man from the country.&dquo; May we,
today, perhaps suggest that he may be seen as a man from a
developing country, as someone who could afford to spend
his lifetime before the door that was meant only for him. In
fact, we might ask here what meaning time had for this man
from the country who showed no signs of being under time
pressure, or, conversely, who seemed to have an abundance
of time.
It has been already noted by others that time seems to be
almost &dquo;free&dquo; to people in developing societies, that &dquo;they
have more than they can use&dquo; (Riggs, 1964: 113). As &dquo;time
horizons&dquo; do not differ from structured expectations in these
societies, there thus is no scarcity of time (Luhmann, 1968:
13). If there is no scarcity of time, one cannot visualize
either time pressure in these societies or the attendant
individual sense of urgency (Riggs, 1964).
On the other hand, the time factor becomes of growing
concern in the more-developed societies. Less and less time
seems to be available for the increasing number of complex
decisions which have to be made, and which perversely
require more time to be carefully prepared.’ Wilbert Moore
(1963: 10) has, therefore, correctly noted that the temporal

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order is &dquo;of the essence&dquo; in the largest and most complex
social groups, the bureaucracy or administrative organi-
zations : &dquo;Synchronization, sequence, and rate of activities
operate within narrow tolerable limits.&dquo;
If time cannot be called a scarce thing per se, the notion of
waiting must be the result of an incongruency of time
horizons. Only under the conditions of highly developed
societies can we, therefore, speak about loss of time by
waiting. In fact, only in these societies do mathematical
theories that deal with the problem of how to eliminate
waiting periods, and, thus, &dquo;save&dquo; time seem to be applicable.
This and similar problems have been the concern of writers in
Business Administration. Since any waiting time by custo-
mers will always involve costs, for the firm as well as for the
individual, the question for such writers has been how to
calculate these (Churchman et al., 1957: 18). There has thus
been a burgeoning literature on theories of waiting lines, their
costs to the firm, and ways in which probability theory and
statistical analysis can be applied to reduce such costs by
mass...