Modeling the Evolution of Bureaucracy: Political-Economic Reach and Administrative Complexity
Journal Title: Social Evolution & History - Year 2014, Vol 13, Issue 1
Abstract
It is argued that bureaucracy originated when primary (first-generation) states emerged in a context of interacting chiefdoms, without contact with pre-existing states. A model of the transition from chiefdom to primary state highlights the importance of territorial expansion in this evolutionary process. A related issue is how peoples who successfully resist incorporation can help shape the developmental trajectory of an expanding state. A model of the dynamic between an expanding polity and its neighbors suggests that the effectiveness of incorporation is positively related not simply to the size of the expanding polity, but rather to a positive rate of change in the expanding polity's growth relative to that of resisting polities. Variable relationships of incorporation and resistance will cause the shape of the expanding state's growth trajectory to be not regular and symmetric, but instead asymmetric and non-uniform. Empirical data from several cases of primary state formation are consistent with the expectations of the territorial-expansion model. Some practical implications of this model for contemporary considerations of international relations and global sustainability are considered.
Authors and Affiliations
Charles S. Spencer
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP266045
- DOI -
- Views 131
- Downloads 0
Co-evolution in Big History: A Transdisciplinary and Biomimetic Approach to the Sustainable Development Goals
The objective of this paper is to study the co-evolutionary processes that life has developed over billions of years in the context of ‘Big History’. The main intention is to identify their operational principles and str...
Evidence for Direct Evolutionary Linkages of Agriculture with Other Customs
In a world sample of diverse societies, geographical and other variations can cause misleading low or high correlations be-tween two customs when measured by scores of individual societies. Evolutionary linkage of agricu...
Mega-History and the Twenty-First Century Singularity Puzzle
A series of calculations carried out independently by the Australian, Russian, and American researchers have demonstrated that a crucial global polyfurcation is expected somewhere near the middle of the twenty-first cent...
Sacred Kingship: Cases from Polynesia
This article aims at a description and analysis of sacred kingship in Polynesia. To this aim two cases – or rather island cultures – are compared. The first one is the island of Tahiti, where several complex polities we...
World Order in the Past, Present, and Future
The present article analyzes the world order in the past, present and future as well as the main factors, foundations and ideas underlying the maintaining and change of the international and global order. The first two s...