Red Tape Measurement

Red tape measurement is the systematic assessment of burdensome organisational rules and procedures that impose compliance costs without advancing the legitimate purposes the rules were meant to serve. The approach was given rigorous theoretical foundations by Barry Bozeman, whose 2000 book Bureaucracy and Red Tape defined red tape precisely so that it could be studied rather than merely complained about. Crucially, the framework distinguishes pathological red tape from legitimate, functional rules, and separates the objective existence of rules from managers' and employees' perceptions of them. Its goal is to measure how much red tape an organisation carries, where it comes from, and what it costs in performance and morale.