Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".
History
Articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as part of the first sentence of a humorous essay
published in The Economist in 1955, it was reprinted with other essays in the book Parkinson's
Law: The Pursuit of Progress.
He derived the dictum from his extensive experience in the British Civil Service.
A current form of the law is not the one Parkinson refers to by that name in the article, but
a mathematical equation describing the rate at which bureaucracies expand over time.
Much of the essay is dedicated to a summary of purportedly scientific observations supporting
the law, such as the increase in the number of employees at the Colonial Office while
Great Britain's overseas empire declined.
He explains this growth by two forces: "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not
rivals" and "Officials make work for each other."
He notes that the number employed in a bureaucracy rose by 5–7% per year "irrespective of any
variation in the amount of work to be done".
In 1986, Alessandro Natta complained about the swelling bureaucracy in Italy.
Mikhail Gorbachev responded that "Parkinson's law works everywhere".
Corollaries The first-referenced meaning of the law has
dominated, and sprouted several corollaries, the best known being the Stock-Sanford Corollary
to Parkinson's Law:
If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.
Other corollaries include Horstman's Corollory to Parkinson's Law:
Work contracts to fit in the time we give it.
as well as several corollaries relating to computers):
Data expands to fill the space available for storage.
and
Storage requirements will increase to meet storage capacity.
Generalization The law could be generalized further as:
The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource.
An extension is often added:
The reverse is not true.
This generalization has become very similar to the economic law of demand; the lower the
price of a service or commodity, the greater the quantity demanded.
Some define the law in regard to time as:
The amount of time that one has to perform a task is the amount of time it will take
to complete the task.
Related efficiency Parkinson also proposed a rule about the efficiency
of administrative councils.
He defined a "coefficient of inefficiency" with the number of members as the main determining
variable.
This is a semi-humorous attempt to define the size of a committee or other decision-making
body at which it becomes completely inefficient.
In Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress, London: John Murray, 1958 one of the chapters
is devoted to the basic question of comitology: how committees, government cabinets, and other
such bodies are created and eventually grow irrelevant.
Empirical evidence is drawn from historical and contemporary government cabinets.
Most often, the minimal size of a state's most powerful and prestigious body is five
members.
From English history, Parkinson notes a number of bodies that lost power as they grew:
The first cabinet was the Council of the Crown, now the House of Lords, which grew from an
unknown number to 29, to 50 before 1600, by which time it had lost much of its power.
A new body was appointed in 1257, the "Lords of the King's Council", numbering fewer than
10.
The body grew, and ceased to meet when it had 172 members.
The third incarnation was the Privy Council, initially also numbering fewer than 10 members,
rising to 47 in 1679.
In 1715, the Privy Council lost power to the Cabinet Council with eight members, rising
to 20 by 1725.
Around 1740, the Cabinet Council was superseded by an inner group, called the Cabinet, initially
with five members.
At the time of Parkinson's study, the Cabinet was still the official governing body.
Parkinson observed that, from 1939 on, there was an effort to save the Cabinet as an institution.
The membership had been fluctuating from a high of 23 members in 1939, down to 18 in
1954.
A detailed mathematical expression is proposed by Parkinson for the coefficient of inefficiency,
featuring many possible influences.
In 2008, an attempt was made to empirically verify the proposed model.
Parkinson's conjecture that membership exceeding a number "between 19.9 and 22.4" makes a committee
manifestly inefficient seems well justified by the evidence proposed.
Less certain is the optimal number of members, which must lie between three and 20.
That it may be eight seems arguable but is not supported by observation: no contemporary
government in Parkinson's data set had eight members, and only the unfortunate king Charles
I of England had a Committee of State of that size.
He also wrote the book Mrs. Parkinson's Law: and Other Studies in Domestic Science.
See also Parkinson's law of triviality
Hofstadter's law Jevons paradox
List of eponymous laws Peter Principle
Snackwell effect Student syndrome
Time management Time to completion
Darwin Awards Murphy's law
References
Further reading Parkinson, Cyril Northcote, Parkinson's Law,
or The Pursuit of Progress . External links
Parkinson, Cyril Northcote, Parkinson's Law . Parkinson, Cyril Northcote, Parkinson’s
Law, The Economist . ———, Parkinson's Law, The Economist .
Brimelow, Peter [August 7, 1989], How Do You Cure Injelitance?
C. Northcote Parkinson, the father of Parkinson's Law, Forbes 144: 42–3 .