Parkinson's Law or the Pursuit of Progress

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Manchester Guardian 'Administrative bodies develop their own peculiar social life by which they breathe and perpetuate themselves down the years. Immensely hygienic ant-heaps, they call for a new kind of entomologist to codify and explain the odd scurryings along their passages. They have now found him in Professor C. Northcote Parkinson.' Taper in The Spectator 'The next time somé rogue gets up in the House of Commons and declares that it would not be in the public interest to reveal how many narks are at present employed full-time in attempting to persuade shopkeepers to break the law by selling them a sausage and a lefthanded corkscrew after lighting-up time on a Wednesday, I trust that a copy of this book, suitably bound in leád, will whistle down from the Public Gallery and catch him just behind the ear. Nor is this the only field in which Professor Parkinson reveals a devastatingly meticulous knowledge of reality and dresses it in a deceptively opaque garb of jest.' Birmingham... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Manchester Guardian 'Administrative bodies develop their own peculiar social life by which they breathe and perpetuate themselves down the years. Immensely hygienic ant-heaps, they call for a new kind of entomologist to codify and explain the odd scurryings along their passages. They have now found him in Professor C. Northcote Parkinson.' Taper in The Spectator 'The next time somé rogue gets up in the House of Commons and declares that it would not be in the public interest to reveal how many narks are at present employed full-time in attempting to persuade shopkeepers to break the law by selling them a sausage and a lefthanded corkscrew after lighting-up time on a Wednesday, I trust that a copy of this book, suitably bound in leád, will whistle down from the Public Gallery and catch him just behind the ear. Nor is this the only field in which Professor Parkinson reveals a devastatingly meticulous knowledge of reality and dresses it in a deceptively opaque garb of jest.' Birmingham Post 'Tfij "science" of administration will never be the same again. Professor Parkinson, splendidly parodying the methods and phrases of the statistician and the student of institutions, has exploded a mine beneath it. Beneath the mock-solemn parody lurks a trap-door which huris one down face to face with all too hideous truths. The Professor's admirers compare him with Stephen Potter, but he stands on his own, with his blend of pricks to bubbles of pretension and of frightening home truths.' • The Observer 'No departments could ever run as Parkinson describes them and yet every painful piece of lunacy to which he refers is based on acute observation of things which actually do happen.' Vissza