RED TAPE, FORMALIZATION, AND MULTPLE OPERATIONISM
Rainey, Pandey, and Bozeman(1995), in a comparative study of public and private managers’ perceptions of red tape, test several explanatory models. The theoretical definition of red tape offered by Rainey, Pandey, and Bozeman is “rules, regulations, and procedures that remain in force and entail a compliance burden but have no efficacy for the rules’ functional object.” Several different measures of red tape are used in this study, including a global measure of red tape, a measure of formalization, personnel rule constraints, administrative delays, and number of decision makers (see exhibit 2 for details on operationalization). The global measure of red tape(called general administrative red tape) is true to the theoretical definition. With respect to the formalization measure, the correspondence between theoretical and operational definitions is not as conclusive.