Parkinson's law first appeared as the first sentence of Cyril Northcote Parkinson's article published in the Economist magazine in 1955. According to this law, the length of a job is directly proportional to the length of time spent to complete that job (wikipedia, 2020). We can confirm this proposition with the following sentence. 'The busiest person is the one who can create free time'. To give a brief example, if a person who wants to send a postcard has a lot of time, he can spend hours choosing a good postcard. He buys and sends the most beautiful postcard after a detailed examination. But this is not the same for a busy person. Someone who is trying to get to work and has limited time to choose and send a postcard quickly chooses and sends it. We can say that the person we define as busy makes quicker decisions than the other is directly proportional to his limited time. We see that this example is compatible with Parkinson's proposition that 'the length of the job is directly proportional to the time spent'. Parkinson said these words based on his experiences working in government offices as a British civil servant. According to Parkinson's observations, this situation was quite common in public areas, where there was a discrepancy between the amount of work done and the number of civil servants doing that work.
According to Parkinson, officials in the bureaucracy were trying to increase their number of subordinates and prevent possible position competition by dividing the work that needed to be done among the subordinates. This situation made the official an indispensable element in the superior-subordinate hierarchy. Parkinson thought that there was no direct relationship between the workload in state institutions and the number of personnel undertaking that job, and argued that red tape and corruption would increase at the same rate as errors in personnel selection and the growth of the bureaucratic organization. According to Parkinson, excessive bureaucracy and excessive personnel recruitment will cause a decrease in efficiency (Çelik, 1993).
With technological developments, the need for personnel in public administration is decreasing. However, with an understanding of reducing unemployment or in order to prevent the employment areas from shrinking, no personnel are laid off and these personnel are given new duties. With new assignments, there is a search for new personnel, and in this case, the pyramid will rise even more. I think it would not be wrong to interpret this situation as a vicious circle. Many companies or any organization operating for profit is experiencing the same situation, the number of personnel working within the company increases, but the same increase is not the same in terms of profit or efficiency (Çiftçi, 2019).
