The term ”red tape” dated back to Medieval England where the kings’ administration used an actual red tape to bind the most essential court documents, needed special attention (Goodsell, 2003). Nowadays, the term is used figuratively and it represents one of the most detrimental administrative occurrences of our time. It has a vast influence on all kinds of public and private institutions and businesses as well as in the everyday life of the citizens. Usually, red tape is associated with long queues, endless filling out of documents and forms, as well as with a lot of stress and negative emotions (Krishnaswamy, 2006:18). People are affected by it on all levels of their private as well as professional life. Furthermore, red tape is regarded …show more content…
His study was comparative and stressed on the fact that public officials encountered much more administrative constraints than their colleagues in private organizations. However, the breakthrough in the red tape literature came with the research of Bozeman, who in 1993 provided the definition of organizational red tape- “rules, regulations and procedures that remain in force and entail a compliance burden for the organization but have no efficacy for the rules’ functional object” (Bozeman, 1993: 283), which is the most cited definition in the field to this day. This definition presupposes that red tape is objective in nature, but scholars like Kaufman and Feeney (2012) noted that most conducted researches are based on research methods like interviews and surveys, measuring red tape subjectively, or otherwise looking for difference in individuals’ …show more content…
Later, Bozeman himself decided to capture this multi-level perspective of red tape’s nature and provided a second definition, called stakeholder’s red tape: “organizational rules, regulations, and procedures that remain in force and entail a compliance burden, but serve no object valued by a given stakeholder group” (Bozeman, 1993:284). Pandey (1995) confirms the early findings of red tape’s subjectivity by stating that the individuals within an organization can define rules or regulation as detrimental only through their personal, one-sided judgment. Additionally, alongside with Welch (2007), he argues that red tape’s perceptions are positively related to people’s subjective attitudes and experiences. In this relation, Moynihan et al. (2012:328) denote that red tape influence people’s behavior, “which depend a good deal upon the experience of the