My favorite way of thinking about this is that every undertaking needs people to carry it out and logistical demands. The people who do the work ('technicians')

My favorite way of thinking about this is that every undertaking needs people to carry it out and logistical demands. The people who do the work ('technicians') are focused on accomplishing the specific goal, they are often poorly suited to secure resources for the entire group. On the flip side, those who focus on logistics ('administrators') are isolated from the underlying goal. They invest their time into work that, by necessity, relies on an abstracted notion about the details of the work. This creates conditions where the administrators are always at risk of self-dealing and of mis-understanding self-dealing as supporting the underlying work. The technicians can self-deal as well, but because they are not in charge of coordinating resources across the org, the impact is smaller. It's easy to accuse any particular technician who disagrees that it's the technician who lacks a sufficiently wide view (and in fact this is always a danger). Selfish people who want to secure resources for themselves thrive in this area - but the situation does not require selfishness to become degenerate.