I've made the claim that modes of organization can be understood as technologies, where by "technology" I mean a way of solving a problem that is external to the person solving it, as opposed to a skill or behaviour, which is internal to the person.
The problem organizational modes solve is, "Getting people to act together toward some goal without tripping over each other too often."
Problems are things that people--not organizations or goups--have, but not everyone has this problem of getting people to act in concert. The people who do are called "leaders".
What I'm going to argue this week is that there are three organizational modes or technologies that have dominated most of history, and that the Modern world is distinguished from the pre-modern by its dominant organizational mode.
Modes of organization are broad categories of technology, like "land transport", or "ocean transport", or "air transport", each of which is united by a set of common constraints, but within which there is a great deal of diversity. As such this way of understanding human organizations is more abstract than the usual categories that one finds in Marx or elsewhere, and things that are nominally opposites can be seen as instances of the same organizational mode.
A single artifact can also contain elements of all modes: the flying boat that illustrates this week's post is capable of moving on land or water as well as air, but it is a plane, not a boat or ground transport. This is typical of technologies: even while one is dominant, others may be important components of a whole system. But claiming a flying boat proves that land, sea, and air modes of transport are all identical is a mistake: different modes of organization are different, even though many organizations include elements of all of them.
The Three Organizational Modes (so far)
The three modes that have been dominant at various times are:
1) Dunbar Mode: this is sometimes called "anarchy", "communalism", or similar names, but I'm naming it after the primary constraint it exists under, which is that it can only effectively organize groups up to about 150 people, which is known as "Dunbar's number" after British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who noticed that all kinds of groups seemed to top out around this number.
Groups that are sometimes referred to as "pre-political peoples", "stone age tribes", and the like, are in Dunbar mode, and may even have developed techniques to ensure they stay there, because without special care Dunbar mode is unstable against the hierarchical modes. Dunbar mode is defined by what it lacks: hierarchy and permanent enforcers, even though it still has leaders and status. But an informal system of status is not a formal hierarchy.
2) Moral Hierarchy Mode: in this mode there is a self-maintaining hierarchy of power where the people who occupy various levels of the hierarchy all have some kind of moral warrant for their position, usually in the form of being born to the right parents, but often justified in more theoretical terms. This mode dominated the world between the agricultural revolution--or maybe earlier--and the Early Modern era. There are still significant bits of it around. If I wanted to sound all World Historical and stuff I'd call this the Mode of the God-Kings or something. The notion that kings or queens have a divine right to rule and so must be crowned by religious powers is very much part of this mode.
3) Amoral Hierarchy Mode: like Moral Hierarchy mode, but without the moral warrant as a requirement for leadership. Anyone, in theory, can rise (or fall) to any point on the hierarchy. This is the dominant mode of the modern world: socialist bureaucracies, capitalist corporations, non-profits, political parties, and even universities are organized using the technologies of amoral hierarchies. Amoral hierarchies are sometimes called "meritocracies", which is another normative term I want to avoid: there is not necessarily anything meritorious about who occupies what position in an amoral hierarchy, which is defined solely by the lack of moral warrant required to be on a given level.
Those are the three modes, and they all come in many different variants.
Capitalism and state socialism are both amoral hierarchies. Feudalism and the rigid system of divine hierarchy overseen by the god-kings of ancient Egypt are both moral hierarchies. Pirate crews, villages throughout history, and modern informal organizations like book clubs are all Dunbar mode organizations.
Because the constraints are common across all the diverse instances within a mode, variations within a mode cannot escape them: no amount of fiddling with a truck's engine is going to make it float or fly. It will still remain a mode of land transport, with all the strengths and weaknesses that implies. This is important when we come to consider alternatives to capitalism and modernity.
I've chosen the names for the modes based on various considerations, which I'll talk about as I go through them. Over the next few weeks I'll write a brief overview of what I see as the important features of each mode, and where they fit into history, but first I want to talk about why we need modes of organization in the first place.
The purpose of this series is to order my thinking and express the basic idea that "organizational modes are technologies, and this approach can be usefully applied to understanding human organizations from book clubs to whole societies, which exhibit three dominant modes, one of which--amoral hierarchies--distinguishes the Modern world from everything that came before" As always, my use of "to be" in its various forms implies that "a thing can be usefully understood as", not "there is a Real Essence that defines this thing to the exclusion all all others, and Ye Shall Have No Definitions Before It."
I am a Bayesian and an epistemic pragmatist. That I think this way of understanding is useful and powerful does not preclude other ways of understanding, so long as they conform to the constraints that objective reality puts on them. Sometimes, as in fundamental scientific theories, objective reality puts on constraints that are so tight we have only one or two ways of fulfilling them, or in a few cases none at all (so far). In other cases reality's constraints are a lot more relaxed, and we should be too. But in no case are we simply free to believe whatever we damn well please.
Historical Implications
Because these modes are technologies, they aren't mutually exclusive and they don't come in "stages" or any other progressive or faux-evolutionary sequence of the kind found in Hegelian gibberish and its materialist descendants.
My earliest hominid ancestor used a weight at the end of a lever--a hammer--to bash things. Probably another one of my ancestors, if history is anything to go by. A few days ago I used a weight at the end of a lever to bash something (the broken end of a screw that was sticking out of a bit of scrap wood I wanted to use for part of a make-shift post). I used the same technology as my most remote ancestor despite being surrounded by much fancier tools, because there is no strict replacement of technologies. Despite the invention and popularity of nail guns, at no point did anyone ever say, "Now we are in the era of late-stage hammerism..."
And even though in the course of technological development some things tend to come earlier, neither is there any strict sequence of technological development.
This is true even though sometimes technologies do very nearly replace each other: digital imaging has more-or-less completely replaced film for a wide variety of applications.
Even so: technologies--including technologies of organization--have no strict ordering, and no strict replacement.
So we should expect the following pattern in history: the use of a particular organizational mode as the commonplace default, with the fairly common use of other modes, plus a few minor instances of other modes that aren't well-developed or much appreciated. Revolutions in technology occur as people figure out of how to do something in another mode better, which may happen very slowly, which is the usual way extremely rapid change happens: quantitative change accumulates until it produces qualitative change. Various attempts at heavier-than-air flight were made, but they all failed until someone came up with an engine that produced thrust that exceeded drag, and was light enough that lift from a practical air-frame exceeded weight.
As technologies develop, there are often points where an approach that used to be inferior becomes superior, at least within a limited domain, and this results in a sudden change that has been slowly developing for a long time.
Mechanical calculators--what used to be called "adding machines"--were superior to electronic calculators up until the early 1970s, and slide rules continued to be useful compared to all but the most sophisticated electronic calculators for a few years after that. Electronic desktop calculators had been making gains in capability and dropping in cost until they reached the point where they were as capable as and not much more expensive than slide rules and the like, and shortly after they were better in every way: speed, precision, ease of use, range of functions supported, and so on.
Slow progressive improvement created a mode switch when this happened, and within a few years hardly anyone used slide rules or adding machines.
Electronic calculators had been around for many years by that point.
We should expect the same to be true of organizational modes. Even though there will likely be a dominant technology of organization at any time, others will co-exist with it, and may undergo slow improvement that eventually results in their runaway success. A technology of organization that allows leaders to achieve their goal of organizing people more efficiently or effectively will get used more and more often, and it will get modified to apply to more and more cases, which will drive that mode to dominance even though different modes are still around and still in use.
Given there are so far only three modes of human organization, this cycle has only happened a few times to organizational modes, but it's gone on many times in non-organizational technologies, and in these we can see the stumblings and gropings that are typical of technological change.
Prior to the development of steam power, for example, various other forms of mechanical power were in use, particularly wind and water. Each of these took diverse forms. Wind drove mills, and it drove ships. The same mode appeared in very different guises.
When practical steam engines were first developed in late 17th century England they were fearfully inefficient and uncompetitive with other forms of mechanical power. Only their use as drivers for pumps in coal mines justified their use, as the fuel was readily available. Nor were these engines the first of their mode: simple steam turbines (aeolipiles) were known to the Greeks, thousands of years before.
Similarly we'll see that the seeds of the amoral hierarchy can be found centuries before it became dominant. The argument could be made that the Roman army was an early, imperfect, example. But the technology was restricted to the military: the rest of Roman society was still divide into classes where a moral warrant provided by equestrian or senatorial birth was required to occupy the upper reaches of the hierarchy.
Why Humans Need Organizational Technologies
Ravens don't need organizational technologies. Neither do cows. Neither do ants, or bees, or octopuses.
Humans live in cooperative groups that are much larger than families, and this is a famously rare characteristic. Most animals are loners. Bears, for example, live solitary lives. They get together to mate, and the mother spends some time raising her offspring, but otherwise they don't have any use for each other.
Herd animals and flocking birds live in large groups for at least part of the year, but there's not a lot of cooperation going on. They don't usually organize themselves beyond some simple stimulus-response stuff that's required to keep the group together.
Pack hunters, notably wolves and orca, live in cooperative groups, often involving closely-related individuals. Like humans, there is often some hierarchy in these groups, or at least status, but lacking the general representational ability that humans possess they don't seem to have much flexibility in how they are organized, although that could be a matter of us not understanding them well enough to see the diversity of structures that are there. Biggs and resident orca have very different social structures, near as we can tell, which may reflect choices made by intelligent beings.
Our closest relatives--chimps and bonobos--live in groups, and may have some structural flexibility, just as they have some use of other technologies, like sticks.
The thing about these group-living animals is that outside of the group they often don't do very well, and may not even survive. This is probably even more true of humans than others.
Humans live by cooperating more effectively, in larger groups, than any other species except the tightly-programmed eusocial insects. And because we have generally representational intelligence--where anything is able to stand for anything else--we have the ability to plan and communicate in ways that exceed those of most, possibly all, other species.
As such, technologies that enhance our organizational capacity have a unique potential to extend our dominion over the Earth and everything that's in it... for good or ill.
If humans were atomic individuals who didn't need to be embedded in a cooperative group to survive, we wouldn't be able to get anything like the same benefit from fancy organizational technologies and would be unlikely to invent them.
Likewise, if we had fists that could pound nails we wouldn't need hammers. But we don't. We fill those needs with technologies, and next week I'll talk at more length about an early and still-popular technological mode of organization, which is Dunbar's.
You know I think this is weird stuff, and makes no sense to me. It's no coincidence you're citing Robin Dunbar because that's where you're going with this. It's some kind of evolutionary functionalism, or the re-discovery of it. To be fair to you, there are lots of people who work on projects like this. Yes, they are all wrong, too. You should be reading Max Weber and the Weberian sociologists.
Thanks your informative piece this topic! As usual, I find your parallel examples very helpful and clarifying.