Talk:Parkinson's law
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- This is not a Law in the legal meaning of the word, more of a Satire of a Law of nature.
I think that this note is completely unnecessary. Anyway someone should expand this article a bit and add some realworld examples. --Taw
Is this really a satire on the law of nature? Does work not expand the more time that is given? -Adrian.
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[edit] Example
Here's an example to this that I was told. I forgot the name of the involved company, but it was rather large. What happened is that in order to fight escalating bureaucracy, this company would freeze all its regular reports at the beginning at every new year, and reports would only resume once they were actually requested. Apparently it turned out that each year, 15% of the reports were never requested again. However, by the end of the year, the total volume of reports generated was back to what it was at the end of the previous year - that is to say, the amount of work saved by discontinuing 15% of the reports was eventually compensated for by the invention of new reports.
- Here's a link to an excellent example of Parkinson's Law, which was penned by Parkinson, himself. See graph four, in particular. -- Schnaz 16:15, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
Merely advising that I'm going to edit that stuff about "the law of cost and demand". No such "law". Parkinson's law, while we're at it, is an inductively posited relationship between certain behaviors and their outcomes and therefore does qualify as a theory, though not necessarily as a law, though Parkinson is obviously trying to be a humorous in any case. Should also say that I'm not the person writing at the start of this section (Jacko)
[edit] Another two laws?
There are more laws in the original book. Some of them are to be found on the Web:
Parkinson's Laws: 1) Work expands to fill the time available for its completion; the thing to be done swells in perceived importance and complexity in a direct ratio with the time to be spent in its completion. 2) Expenditures rise to meet income. 3) Expansion means complexity; and complexity decay. 4) The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done. 5) If there is a way to delay an important decision the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it. 6) The progress of science is inversely proportional to the number of journals published. [1]
Another one relates buildings and the importance of its institution. I didn't find a real quotation just remember it being there and it is mentioned on http://www.samuelgriffith.org.au/papers/html/volume4/v4conc.htm:
Parkinson's laws, namely that the importance of an institution is inversely proportional to the magnificence of the building in which it is housed.
[edit] Injelitance
Certainly, no article on Parkison is complete without a mention, if not a discussion, of his concept of injelitance -- the rise to authority of individuals with unusually high combinations of incompetence and jealousy. Here's a good link on the concept: How Do You Cure Injelitance? -- Schnaz 16:15, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] See Also
Not sure I get the relevance of the link to the "color of the bikeshed." Admittedly, it is very cool Wikijargon, but I don't think it's relevant here. -- Schnaz 16:26, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
- The bikeshed bits have nothing to do with wikijargon. This term (or analogy) has been around for a long time, and was popularized by Poul-Henning Kamp of The FreeBSD Project on the mailinglists.
- It also has quite a bit of relevance, as the observation formulated as the bikeshed analogy bears a direct and bilateral relation to Parkinson's observations on the workings of committees and such. Zuiram 01:15, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Just pasting a quote from this book which is relevant to this item:
- If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the general validity of all scientific method!
- If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge.
