Bureaucracies as Deontic Systems

Abstract

Bureaucratic offices are not only for clerical work, but more important, they are for officiating in the sense of issuing directives, granting permissions, enforcing prohibitions, waiving obligations, and so forth. Bureaucracies are thus deontic systems for organizational and social control. Conventional information processing approaches are inadequate for capturing these aspects of bureaucratic modeling. A logic-based representation that emphasizes deontic and performative aspects is proposed. © 1988, ACM. All rights reserved.