08 February 2011

The system gets the results it wants

Your reading of the week: The Singapore Monitor interviews Ivy Goh Nair

Discussion questions:

1. What are the properties of a bureaucratic structure that simultaneously absolve individuals within the system from responsibility and accountability and hoist the same responsibility and accountability to other individuals?

2. Who has the function within the Singapore civil service to exercise oversight over this transactional system of shared/deferred/inferred responsibility and accountability?

3. How would this overseer function be expected to work - and how would it actually work out? Why would the two not coincide?