Charting a Course
As an introduction to the blog, the previous post “Insider Problems” left out a few key points. Here I’m more specific about where the project came from and what lies ahead.
This project began years ago as an attempt to understand issues arising in my community organizing work. Some of what I experienced could be filed under the heading “Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” but through my search for answers I also found striking contradictions in basic facts of organizational life, common to corporations and the state, as well. Professional norms and conduct; familiar ways of structuring organizations; ideas about management, efficiency, and ‘impact’: these familiar elements of the workplace sound politically neutral but are typically imbued with the cult of expertise, the cult of authority, obsession with status, disdain for alternative viewpoints, and a willful ignorance of democratic possibilities. These are the markers of persistent but suppressed political dynamics at work.
This project tracks the political content of struggles around organizations. I dip back into mostly older (mid-twentieth-century) writings on bureaucracy, that often ambiguous subject which deals with how power works in administrative hierarchies and institutions. This work dovetails with kindred writing on the life-worlds of professionals, the middle-class technicians of the militarized knowledge economy. These discussions offer important insight into how institutions came to be what they are today. Nevertheless, we can’t understand power in institutions, then or now, without seeing them in context: for the period after World War II, that context was Cold War liberalism, premised on justifying a globalizing capitalism and its sponsor, the U.S. “warfare-welfare state.” Framing present-day institutions—and here I include a wide range of public, corporate, and philanthropic organizations—requires understanding the world-historical transformations that Cold War liberalism underwent in the downturn of the 1970s, the large-scale financialization of the U.S. economy that followed, long-running programmes of neoliberal austerity, and the urgent social, environmental, economic, and geo-political crises of the twenty-first century.
You might be skeptical that such a tour of history and social science could offer much resolution to the puzzles I started with, the frustrations of community organizing. To be clear, I don’t offer any simple explanations here, nor do I claim that a discussion of the Cold War era immediately reveals obvious answers to today’s problems.
No, here’s the issue as I see it: the ways we organize ourselves, the ways we are managed in organizations, and increasingly the ways we are asked to manage ourselves as if we’re all entrepreneurs at heart, all of these orientations are presented sometimes as natural, obvious, and necessary, and sometimes as innovative, totally new, and a clear break with all that came before. In the former case, a history of the present helps us see how both our institutions and their employees could be very different from what they’ve become—regimes that are supposed to be natural law, governing issues of human nature, are in fact the result of political choices by real people, governing problems specific to their moment in history and their place in the world. Likewise, by discussing the political problems that shaped older patterns of bureaucracy and management, we can ask better questions about supposedly innovative styles of management—for example, to what extent do new styles of management enact merely superficial changes to old regimes without resolving their fundamental problems, such as the need to control workers and justify an oppressive system of ruthless profit-seeking?
To get back to my starting point: many of us recognize that there are major political problems that we need to address today, whether they be a violently racist system of policing, imperialism and never-ending wars, climate change and environmental catastrophe, poverty amidst plenty, and on and on. We organize ourselves to respond to these urgent problems, and when we do so we often adopt ways of organizing, scaling up, and building institutions that are entangled with the very state and corporate regimes most responsible for these crises. Seeing and understanding those entanglements is an important step towards organizing ourselves in a way that builds human freedom.