Introduction
Since I started my professional
career (22 years ago and counting, how does time fly!) I’ve been fascinated by
“organizations”, from the mom & pop corner store near my first job site to the humungous multinational corporation I
worked for, with almost 100,000 employees distributed across 49 countries, and everything
in between including churches, political parties, sport teams, nations… a
fascination initially born from antagonism, whose early form I found reflected
in a little known novel: I still remember the jolt of identification I felt
when reading, still in High School, The
Water-Method Man, by John Irving, where a friend of the novel’s main
character is a documentary filmmaker (Ralph Packer) who is opposed to any form
of human association, and devotes his work to denounce all of them (the title
character, Fred “Bogus” Trumper, just goes along as occasional sound editor).
My youthful and contrarian fixation has softened considerably (and nowadays I
style myself as an active member of a number of groups, starting with the
family I myself ended up forming and being responsible for), but the interest
and curiosity about what makes people renounce at least part of their
independence and freedom to form more or less structured congeries, to submit
to common rules and to participate willingly in the shared narrative of those
communities, to the point of explaining themselves through such narratives
(even with the sad but unavoidable consequence of sharpening that definition
through the exclusion of those outside the group, which suddenly are deemed
somewhat defective humans, when not outright less-than-human), that interest
and curiosity have not dimmed a bit.
After doing consulting work for a
dreary number of those organizations (admittedly a very particular subset of
them, composed by those formed with the overwhelming and restrictive end of
maximizing the economic return to their owners –which we will find later on
that hides and obscures the real reasons why people join them and interact with
them), and studying an even bigger number from a scholarly perspective (religions,
cults, sects and ideologies are part and parcel of the History of Philosophy)
nowadays I’m paid for developing, finessing and optimizing the functioning of
the particular organization I work for, so I have unavoidably developed a
general theory of the organization (it sounds mildly better in German: Allgemeine Organisationtheorie –AOT, or
even Allgemeine Gesellschafttheorie –AGT
if we focus on organizations that are at the same time societies, which
constitute a particularly interesting subset), which I will be developing and
formalizing in a number of subsequent posts (which may or may not end up being
as long as my previous series on metaphysics, you are all warned).
Let’s begin with the basic outline of
such a theory, defining what an organization is, and then we could move towards
summarizing what previous efforts have been made of explaining how they work
(and why they exist in the first place). Both the definition and the review of
previous explanations constitute the “foundations” I referred to in the title.
Definition
Without further ado, I
propose the following operational definition of the subject of our interest:
An Organization is a set of human individuals
(members) that cooperate towards the achievement of a definite end. That
cooperation entails the acceptance of certain rules, known by at least some of the
members, that specify what is expected of each (duties) and what protections
they can count on (rights)
Dimensions of the
organization
There are a number of features that
immediately come to mind and allow for very different arrangements under that
common definition. Exploring those features will make clearer what we are
talking about and they will be helpful later on to classify the organizations subject
of our study. Those determining features of all organizations are:
·
Adaptability: some organizations are intended for
a (shorter or longer) limited period of time, in which for it to be successful
the end of the organization must be achievable. The Apollo project or a SuperPAC
for an electoral cycle in the USA are examples of organizations with an
intended definite duration. On the other hand side, some organizations are set
up with the explicit intent of lasting forever, the Catholic Church or IBM being
opposite examples of indefinite duration. In both cases, organizations differ
in the extent to which they can adapt to changing circumstances within their
lifespan. Some have built-in mechanisms to alter their statutes and regulations
to better reflect the changes in their environment, whilst others lack those
adaptation mechanism, and have to rely on sheer size or strength to weather the
potentially negative impact of those external changes. European Nation States
would be an example of the first kind, all of them having regulatory bodies that
contemplate how to modify the different laws (from the fundamental one –the constitution
to the more detailed norms and regulations) to reflect a changing social
reality, as would also be some flexible companies that have considerably change
their way of working to adapt to the changing preferences of the clients (IBM,
Microsoft, Apple, although all of them passed through periods of turmoil when
it seemed they could not adapt fast enough and would be crushed by forces they
could not control). The aforementioned Catholic Church (or may be the European
Union, the jury is still out on that one) would rather be examples of
organizations not adaptable at all, sticking to their founding principles and
their traditional way of doing things no matter what the dominant current of
external opinion is.
·
Dominance: Not all the organizations occupy the
same amount, or influence to the same extent the life of their members, and we
reflect this degree of influence with the dominance measure, which (in a
necessarily rough and tumble manner) reflects the percentage of a member
actions that is determined by his belonging to the organization (or, which may
be easier to measure, the percentage of the member’s waking time that is
devoted to further its end). According to this measure, the companies people in
advanced economies work for tend to rank very high in the dominance scale. People
spend in them (supposedly working non-stop and doing as directed and regulated
by their contracts) between 1,800 and 2,400 hours per year (depending on the
country and the level of commitment of the employee), if we assign 7 meager
hours per day to sleep, there are 6,205 waking hours in a year, which means the
intensity of the organizations we work for is between 29% and 38% (leaving
between 71% and 62% of their waking time “free” for the pursuit of other, more
private interests, although long commutes can significantly dent how much of
that time is actually freely available). An interesting case is posed by the
potential overlap of the multiple organizations a person may belong to. In the
case of religious affiliation, one is supposed to submit to her church’s
commands 24 hours a day, so the dominance of such organizations would in theory
be 100%. In practice I’m inclined to believe it is much less, there being
important differences between churches, and even more between individuals
within the same church. You may spend weeks working with a protestant or a
catholic without knowing (or being able to deduct much) about her faith, whilst
her job’s content, revealing her position in the organization she works for
(her duties, her skills, the resources she can command, her commitment level)
is apparent just after a few minutes of interaction. However, even before that
you may have known if he were a Hasidic Jew or a Muslim (I have had to resort
back to the masculine article to stand for the generic because in those
particular cases it most likely would be a “he”, both religions are inherently
opposed to let women work), and it wouldn’t take much longer if he were a Mormon
(rejecting coffee, plus a distinct code of dressing are quick giveaways), hence
my contention that even within religions, some are organized to occupy their devotes’
lives much more dominantly.
·
Voluntariness: although we have used the term
“cooperation”, the members of the organization can be forcibly compelled to
such cooperation (under different degrees of duress), thus we can distinguish
between voluntary organizations like the Red Cross or the Kiwanis and
involuntary organizations like a slave plantation or (where there still is
compulsory conscription) the army. There are different levels of compulsion,
and different means, from the outright threat of bodily force to subtler psychological
manipulation ways of coercing members against their will (the existence of such
an independent will being a problem of the first order which we will need to
temporarily sidestep)
·
Isocracy: all organizations have to make
decisions in the pursuit of their ends, as they all start with limited
information on the difficulties they may find or the actual yield of the
resources they intend to apply, and no foundational charter can be so complete
and exhaustive as to determine what every member has to do ate very moment and
how they have to act in every and all situation which may develop whilst
discharging their duties. The participation on those decisions (and the
recognition about who can legitimately participate in them, or whose decisions
have the authority to be enforced) may be distributed in more or less unequal
ways, which we reflect with the measure of isocracy (from ancient Greek, iso meaning equal distribution and kràtos meaning rule, or decision-power).
By the way, I’ve preferred isocracy to the more traditional concept of
democracy as the latter (etymologically meaning “government of the people”
instead of “government of the equals” or “government equally apportioned”) is
not general enough, applying specifically to the field of politics, and presupposing
a homogeneous set of actors (the demos,
or “people”) that may limit the range of application of the theory (for example
,there is no way to consider a nuclear family or the workers of a multinational
company a demos). That said, we can after
some thought find examples of very isocratic organizations (where decision
power is highly distributed, and all the members have an equal say in every
decision), like merchant guilds in Renaissance Italy or a handful of egalitarian
hunter-gatherer societies; on the other extreme, there are abundant examples of
highly autocratic organizations, where power is very much concentrated at the
top and only a few (in the most extreme case, only one) take decisions that
affect everybody, from the army of any country in any age to most modern
corporations to the Inca empire (which, by the way, made it so vulnerable to
foreign conquer once its head was captured)
·
Simplicity: there are a number of ways of
measuring the simplicity of an organization, but we will stick to a reasonably
simple one: how many different roles there are (formally recognized within the
organization as having different duties and different rights), either because
they are at different hierarchical layers (so at least as many roles as hierarchy
levels) or because they have responsibility over different areas of concern of
the organization. We can further distinguish between absolute simplicity (total
number of different roles) and relative simplicity (number of roles divided by
number of members of the organization). We do this because although simplicity
is generally inversely correlated with size (organizations with more members
tend to need more specific roles to coordinate and supervise them, thus being
more complex, or less simple) it is far from a perfect correlation. Let’s take
again the Catholic Church as an example. The number of roles within it (not
getting too fine grained within the Vatican curia minutiae) is quite small
(pope, bishop, cardinal, priest, monk, nun, lay), so its absolute complexity is
small, it is a very simple organization. Given its size (above one billion
nominal members), its relative simplicity is much, much bigger, probably one of
the biggest around (the closer to zero the value, the bigger the simplicity, in
this case it is less than 7x10E-6 persons per role). A very different case is
offered by the childless marriage we also considered before. In an egalitarian
society as ours there is only one role (spouse), so it is the simplest
organization conceivable, although it’s relative simplicity is quite less due
to its also minimal size (one role divided by just two people gives us 0,5
persons per role). Traditional marriages were even less (relatively) simple, as
there were differentiated roles for the husband and the wife, taking the
relative simplicity to a whooping 1 person per role (we can dream of some
Borgian secret society where each member holds a plurality of roles, taking that
quotient above one, but in real life it would be utterly impractical).
·
Equality: although the need of different roles
(with their accompanying different duties and rights) already presuppose a
certain level of inequality, we are specifically dealing here with how equally
the burdens and rewards of belonging to the organization are distributed (and
to what extent the former are proportional to the latter). In a highly unequal
organization the burdens are borne disproportionately by one segment of the
members, and the rewards enjoyed by a different segment, as in a Medieval
fiefdom (where serfs did all the work, under threat of punishment and even
death, and with very little or none safeguards, while the lord and his retinue
enjoyed almost all the products of the serfs’ labor). In a more equal one, even
allowing for some differences, members would enjoy the rewards in proportion to
the burdens imposed on them, and both would be quite similar for all the
members. It is interesting to note that there is some correlation between the
measure we defined previously of isocracy, and this new one of equality, as the
distribution of works and rewards is typically an ongoing decision made within
the organization, and when that decision is itself distributed, and everybody
has an equal say in it, it is most unlikely they will opt for a highly unequal
apportionment of the common product (not entirely to be discarded, specially if
they may end being all of them better off under such inequality, as postulated
by Rawls under the principle of the same name), while in a very autocratic
organization those at the top would find it very easy to overcompensate
themselves (as I said before, unadulterated human nature)
There are a number of features of organizations that are not included in
the previous list for good reasons. Although they are obviously important my
contention is we do not need to make them part of a model that (as we will be
seeing in following posts) is exactly as complex as it should be. For
completeness sake I’ll complete the list with the most obvious, but again do
not expect them to be discussed again, or to be given much consideration when
we discuss how to build the perfect organization
·
Size: measured in number of people that consider themselves
part of the organization, there can be very big ones enlisting millions of
individuals (like the traditional Nation State) and very small ones with just a
handful of them (like a childless marriage, which actually constitutes the
minimal organization regarding size, with just two people forming it). It can alternatively
be measured by the geographical extent of the space on which their members
reside (which can vary from the minuscule, like the organization of philatelists
of the tiny village of Sturunivopol, in Siberia, to the huge which spans the
whole globe)
·
Inclusiveness: some organizations aspire to
universal membership, and profess to be open to everybody regardless of race,
gender or age (note I’ve limited the list of excluding factors to biological
aspects we do not have much control over). Some go a step further and expand
their membership appeal to people with different ideologies, aesthetic
preferences and sexual orientations, while others limit who can apply to subgroups
with a limited range of options in any of those fields
So those are the main dimensions to
characterize an organization, summed in a neat acronym we could call it the
ADVISE model, as it measures Adaptability, Dominance, Voluntariness, Isocracy,
Simplicity and Equality. As you may have noticed each dimension varies between
to potential extremes, but I will argue later on that one of the possible
values of each dimension is preferable in most situations to the other, so it
is most conductive to successfully achieving the organization’s end for it to
be:
Adaptable
Dominant
Voluntary
Isocratic
Simple
Egalitarian
Now, to ensure the robustness and completeness
of the mode, in my next post I will indulge in a bit of historical research of
the main theories that had been advanced to explain why organizations arise,
and how best to structure and shape them.
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