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{{Short description|Adage that work expands to fill its available time}}
{{Distinguish |Parkinson's law of triviality}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=February 2017}}
'''Parkinson's law''' can refer to either of two observations, published in 1955 by the naval historian [[C. Northcote Parkinson]] as an essay in ''[[The Economist]]'':<ref name="original" />
* "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion",
* the number of workers within [[public administration]], [[bureaucracy]] or [[officialdom]] tends to grow, regardless of the amount of work to be done. This was attributed mainly to two factors: that officials want [[Hierarchy|subordinates]], not rivals, and that officials make work for each other.

The first paragraph of the essay mentioned the first meaning above as a "commonplace observation", and the rest of the essay was devoted to the latter observation, terming it "Parkinson's Law".

== First meaning ==
The first-referenced meaning of the law – "Work expands to fill the available time" – has sprouted several [[corollary|corollaries]], the best known being the Stock-Sanford corollary to Parkinson's law:

{{Blockquote|If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.<ref>{{cite book |last1= Pannett |first1= Alan Shalini Sequeira |first2= Andrew |last2= Dines |first3= Andrew |last3= Day |year=2013 |title= Key Skills for Professionals: How to Succeed in Professional Services |page= 65 |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=QhBMlKelYloC&pg=PA65 |publisher=[[Kogan Page]]|isbn= 978-0-7494-6877-4 }}</ref>}}

the Asimov corollary to Parkinson's law:

{{Blockquote|In ten hours a day you have time to fall twice as far behind your commitments as in five hours a day.<ref>Isaac Asimov, in [[Nightfall and Other Stories]], introductory material to "[[The Machine That Won the War (short story)|The Machine That Won the War]]"</ref>}}

as well as corollaries relating to [[computer]]s, such as:

{{Blockquote|Data expands to fill the space available for storage.<ref>{{cite book|title=IT-Service-Management Volgens ITIL|last=Jansen|first=Peter|publisher=[[Pearson Education]]|version=Derde Editie|page=179|year=2008|isbn=978-90-430-1323-9}}</ref>}}

===Generalization===
{{Unreferenced section|date=January 2024}}
The law can be generalized further as:
{{Blockquote|The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource (If the price is zero).}}

An extension is often added:
{{Blockquote|The reverse is not true.}}

This generalization has come to resemble what some economists regard as the [[law of demand]] – namely, the lower the price of a service or commodity, the greater the quantity demanded. This is also referred to as [[induced demand]].

== Second meaning ==
This was the main focus of the essay by [[C. Northcote Parkinson|Cyril Northcote Parkinson]], published in ''[[The Economist]]'' in 1955,<ref name="original">{{cite news |url= http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/management/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14116121 |newspaper=The Economist |title=Parkinson's Law |first=Cyril Northcote |last= Parkinson |date= 19 November 1955 |location= London}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |url= http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70616FF3D55137A93C7A9178ED85F438585F9 |work=The New York Times |title= It's a 'Law' now: Payrolls grow |first= Elizabeth M |last= Fowler |date=5 May 1957}}</ref> and reprinted with other similar essays in the successful 1958 book ''Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress''.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Parkinson |first=C. Northcote |title=Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress |publisher=John Murray General Publishing Division |year=1958 |isbn=978-0719510496 |edition=1st |location=London}}</ref> The book was translated into many languages. It was highly popular in the Soviet Union and its sphere of influence.<ref>{{cite book |last= Brown|first= Archie|date= 2009|title= The Rise and Fall of Communism|url=https://archive.org/details/risefallofcommun00brow|url-access= registration|location= New York|publisher= Ecco|page= [https://archive.org/details/risefallofcommun00brow/page/589 589]|isbn= 978-0-06-113879-9}}</ref> In 1986, [[Alessandro Natta]] complained about the swelling bureaucracy in Italy. [[Mikhail Gorbachev]] responded that "Parkinson's law works everywhere."<ref>{{cite journal |last= O'Sullivan |first= John |author-link= John O'Sullivan (columnist) |date=June 2008 |title=Margaret Thatcher: A Legacy of Freedom |journal=Imprimis |volume=37 |issue=6 |page=6 |publisher=[[Hillsdale College]]}}</ref>

Parkinson derived the dictum from his extensive experience in the [[British Civil Service]]. He gave, as examples, the growth in the size of the British [[Admiralty (United Kingdom)|Admiralty]] and [[Colonial Office]] even though the numbers of their ships and colonies were declining.

Much of the essay is dedicated to a summary of purportedly scientific observations supporting the law, such as the increase in the number of employees at the [[Colonial Office]] while the [[British Empire]] declined (he showed that it had its greatest number of staff when it was folded into the [[Foreign Office]] due to a lack of colonies to administer). He explained this growth using two forces: (1) "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals", and (2) "Officials make work for each other." He noted that the number employed in a [[bureaucracy]] rose by 5–7% per year "irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done".

=== Formula ===
Parkinson presented the growth as a mathematical equation describing the rate at which [[bureaucracy|bureaucracies]] expand over time, with the formula <math>x=(2k^m+P)/n</math>, in which ''k'' was the number of officials wanting subordinates, ''m'' was the hours they spent writing [[minutes]] to each other.

Observing that the promotion of employees necessitated the hiring of subordinates, and that time used answering minutes requires more work; Parkinson states: "In any public administrative department not actually at war the staff increase may be expected to follow this formula" (for a given year) <ref name="original" />

<math display="block">x=\frac{2k^m+P}{n}</math>

*''x'' – number of new employees to be hired annually
*''k'' – number of employees who want to be promoted by hiring new employees
*''m'' – number of working hours per person for the preparation of internal memoranda (micropolitics)
*''P'' – difference: age at hiring&nbsp;− age at retirement
*''n'' – number of administrative files actually completed

==Related efficiency==
In a different essay included in the book, Parkinson proposed a rule about the efficiency of administrative councils. He defined a "coefficient of inefficiency" with the number of members as the main determining variable. This is a semi-humorous attempt to define the size at which a committee or other decision-making body becomes completely inefficient.

In {{Citation |title= Parkinson's Law: The Pursuit of Progress |place= London |publisher= John Murray |year= 1958}} a chapter is devoted to the basic question of what he called ''comitology'': how committees, government cabinets, and other such bodies are created and eventually grow irrelevant (or are initially designed as such). (The word [[comitology]] has recently been independently invented by the European Union for a different non-humorous meaning.)<ref name=OED>{{cite OED|comitology}}</ref><ref name=misuse>{{cite report |title=A Brief List of Misused English Terms in EU Publications |date=18 June 2013 |url=http://ec.europa.eu/translation/english/guidelines/documents/misused_english_terminology_eu_publications_en.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130810041828/http://ec.europa.eu/translation/english/guidelines/documents/misused_english_terminology_eu_publications_en.pdf |archive-date=10 August 2013 }}</ref>

Empirical evidence is drawn from historical and contemporary government cabinets. Most often, the minimal size of a state's most powerful and prestigious body is five members. From English history, Parkinson notes a number of bodies that lost power as they grew:
* The first cabinet was the Council of the Crown, now the [[House of Lords]], which grew from an unknown number to 29, to 50 before 1600, by which time it had lost much of its power.
* A new body was appointed in 1257, the "Lords of the King's Council", numbering fewer than 10. The body grew, and ceased to meet when it had 172 members.
* The third incarnation was the [[Privy Council of the United Kingdom|Privy Council]], initially also numbering fewer than 10 members, rising to 47 in 1679.
* In 1715, the Privy Council lost power to the Cabinet Council with eight members, rising to 20 by 1725.
* Around 1740, the Cabinet Council was superseded by an inner group, called the [[Cabinet of the United Kingdom|Cabinet]], initially with five members. At the time of Parkinson's study (the 1950s), the Cabinet was still the official governing body. Parkinson observed that, from 1939 on, there was an effort to save the Cabinet as an institution. The membership had been fluctuating from a high of 23 members in 1939, down to 18 in 1954.

A detailed mathematical expression is proposed by Parkinson for the coefficient of inefficiency, featuring many possible influences. In 2008, an attempt was made to empirically verify the proposed model.<ref>{{Citation |title= To how many politicians should government be left? |first1= Peter |last1= Klimek |first2= Rudolf |last2= Hanel |author-link3= Stefan Thurner |first3= Stefan |last3= Thurner |date= 14 April 2008 |quote= It is often argued – as now e.g. in the discussion of the future size of the European Commission – that decision making bodies of a size beyond 20 become strongly inefficient. We report empirical evidence that the performance of national governments declines with increasing membership and undergoes a qualitative change in behavior at a particular group size. We use recent UNDP, World Bank and CIA data on overall government efficacy, i.e. stability, the quality of policy formulation as well as human development indices of individual countries and relate it to the country's cabinet size. We are able to understand our findings through a simple physical model of opinion dynamics in groups. |journal= Physica A |volume= 388 |issue= 18 |pages= 3939–3947 |arxiv= 0804.2202 |doi=10.1016/j.physa.2009.06.012 |bibcode=2009PhyA..388.3939K|s2cid= 12097887 }}.</ref> Parkinson's conjecture that membership exceeding a number "between 19.9 and 22.4" makes a committee manifestly inefficient seems well justified by the evidence proposed{{Citation needed|date=September 2023}}. Less certain is the optimal number of members, which must lie between three (a logical minimum) and 20. (Within a group of 20, [[political faction|individual discussions]] may occur, [[splinter group|diluting the power of the leader]].) That it may be eight seems arguable but is not supported by observation: no contemporary government in Parkinson's data set had eight members, and only king [[Charles I of England]] had a Committee of State of that size.

==See also==

{{div col|colwidth=30em}}
* [[Dilbert principle]]
* [[Gustafson's law]]
* [[Hofstadter's law]]
* [[Lewis–Mogridge position]]
* [[Induced demand]]
* [[Iron triangle (US politics)|Iron triangle]]
* [[Jevons paradox]]
* [[Law of triviality]]
* [[List of eponymous laws]]
* [[Peter principle]]
* [[Planning fallacy]]
* [[Reference class forecasting]]
* [[SnackWell effect]]
* [[Student syndrome]]
* [[Time management]]
* [[Zawinski's Law]]
{{div col end}}

==References==
{{Reflist|30em}}

==Further reading==
* {{cite book |last=Parkinson |first= Cyril Northcote |date=1958 |title=Parkinson's Law, or The Pursuit of Progress  |location=London |publisher=John Murray}}
* {{cite news|last1=Grunwald|first1=Beverly|title=Mrs. Parkinson's Law|work=The New York Times Book Review|date=17 November 1968|page=5}}
* [[Planet Money]] [https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/11/19/669395064/episode-877-the-laws-of-the-office Episode 877: "The Laws Of The Office"], 21 November 2018, NPR

==External links==
* {{Citation |url= http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/management/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14116121 |newspaper= The Economist|title=Parkinson's Law |first= Cyril Northcote |last= Parkinson|date= 19 November 1955}}.
* {{Citation |url= http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf |title= Parkinson's Law |first= Cyril Northcote |last= Parkinson |newspaper= The Economist |date=November 1955 |author-mask= 3 |publisher= Berglas }}.
* [http://www.panarchy.org/parkinson/parkinsonlaw.html C. Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson's Law – extract] (1958)

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[[Category:Adages]]
[[Category:Fiscal policy]]
[[Category:C. Northcote Parkinson|Law]]
[[Category:Organizational theory]]
[[Category:The Economist]]
[[Category:Eponymous laws of economics]]
[[Category:Work]]
[[Category:1955 introductions]]