The motivational goals in fixing diverge among the types of people involved
. There are two emerging types: (1) the outsider fixers or professional fixers, and (2) the insider fixers or sideline fixers. The former are those not formally connected to the government agency and they make use of fixing as their main profession that is complete with all the professional skills and techniques. The latter are the officials and employees of the government agencies. They are fixing on the sidelines only because their main income comes not from fixing but from their regular salary. They fix to augment their income, and the profit from fixing sometimes yields higher returns.
Fixers are able to provide the services while the bureaucracy cannot because of the collusive network structure of insider fixers and professional fixers. The collusion is made possible because of the underground and informal networks that connect the professional fixers and the insider fixers.
This collusion leads to the failure of the bureaucracy. The insider fixers deliberately suppress the normal bureaucratic functions to cause undue delays in public transactions. Oftentimes, by simply slowing down the processing of these transactions will already create a ripple of transactional delays. This is stationary banditry, a passive form theft through sluggish behavior that robs the public of timely and adequate bureaucratic response.
It was when some economist who first espoused the metaphor of the roving bandit and the stationary bandit. The roving bandit takes all the loot from his victims whose prosperity is eventually depleted in the looting. On the other hand, the stationary bandit gains his loot not by draining but by getting something out of the continued prosperity of his victims.
In fixing, the stationary bandit gains something from the continued dependence of the public on the bureaucracy and where such dependence is made more intense by deliberately impeding the normal bureaucratic functions. And since the normal bureaucratic functioning is becoming scarce, the public's dependence shifts to the fixers who would now provide the alternative functions. As long as the public's transactions depend on the bureaucracy and as long as the bureaucracy fails to provide the services, fixers will always gain through stationary banditry. Stationary banditry could be a form of bureaucratic predatory behavior when applied to fixing and corruption in the bureaucracy.
It is an ethnographic revelation that professional fixers thrive because of their connections with the insider fixers. Without this connection, fixing among professional fixers is easily eliminated. This is short of saying that professional fixers get protection from insider fixers in government agencies.