Organizational Bureaucracy in Latin America and the Legacy of Spanish Colonialism

As Latin American nations begin to marshal their rapidly growing human and material resources, they frequently encounter organizational infrastructures which are incapable of supporting the rapid process of modernization. Yet, these inadequate infrastructures seem to persist over time, leaving behind unrecoverable losses. Attempts to understand the problems of modernization must not only consider questions of social and economic development, but also questions reflecting on the development of organizational and administrative processes.The central theme of this paper is the argument that the organizational and administrative mechanisms of societal and institutional governance have never quite broken loose from the historic legacy of Spanish colonialism and that the needs of modernizing nations are basically being served by administrative dinosaurs. Other writers have addressed themselves to the theme regarding the influence of colonial institutions on modern life, but the tendency has been to select general administrative practices and trace them across many nations in various periods of time.