Word: parkinsonism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...PARKINSON'S LAW, by C. Northcote Parkinson, Houghton Mifflin Co., 113 pp., $3.00. Illustrated...
...Northcote Parkinson, Raffles Professor of History at the University of Malaya, is an eminent authority on the science of administration. Parkinson's Law is a learned and sometimes mathematical study of the sociology of bureaucracy and bureaucrats...
...called because James Parkinson described...
Among other weighty matters probed by Parkinson are personnel-recruitment policies (first step: "Reject everyone over 50 or under 20 plus everyone called Murphy"); retirement problems (the aging top man must be made to retire "while still able to do the work better than anyone else" or his second in command will enter "the Age of Frustration [and] will never be fit for anything else"); and the high art of spotting key people at cocktail parties ("Their arrival will be at least half an hour after the party begins" and they will rotate about the room clockwise, shunning the walls...
Burbling along in his low-decibel way, Professor Parkinson slyly camouflages the fact that there is as much truth as spoof in his pseudo-scientifically stated findings. Finally, he is as difficult to laugh off as he is easy to laugh with. Author Parkinson promises to make further researches into executive manners. One project: he would like to trace the significance of "the illegibility of signatures, the attempt being made to fix the point in a successful executive career at which the handwriting becomes meaningless even to the executive himself...