Pylimitics

I was recently laid off by a large tech company after more than a decade. The experience reminds me of something I learned when studying organizational behavior many moons ago: there are two organizations, not one. The obvious one is the formal organization. The name, the “mission,” the org chart, the bylaws. Then there is the less visible informal organization. The community. The people involved.

A formal organization contains many informal organizations, because communities form naturally around proximity, interests, shared experiences, and shared activities. My previous organization encompassed tens of thousands of people, for the most part only peripherally aware of each other. But they are all parts of communities. The informal organizations within the formal structure.

Everybody knows this. You can tell because the formal organization supports systems and practices to enable communities. Managers might be trained and coached to do team building, which is usually a clumsy attempt by the formal organization to insert itself into communities. And communication systems are set up to enable communities to function, because the formal organization “knows” that the actual work is performed by communities. They are the “gut bacteria” of formal organizations.

Current communication systems tend to be centralized, sponsored, electronic, and provided by vendors. Github is a communication system; so is Jira. Confluence. The Webex sack of unrelated apps. Microsoft Sharepoint and Teams. The list is practically endless. Formal organizations tend not to be innovative or creative, so there is usually nothing original in these systems; they simply mimic the communication systems that have emerged outside formal organizations. Everybody knows those, too: social media.

When you’re laid off by a formal organization, you’re also removed from the communities within that organization. There are terms for that kind of thing: you’re banished, exiled, shunned, excommunicated. Notice a difference in the implication of “laid off” versus terms like “banished?” Removal from a formal organization is all business, which is the stance the formal organization pretends to adopt. But the activity of a formal organization is accomplished by communities, which are not all business. They’re human.

Years ago there was an interregnum when computing began to be available to everyone, but the internet was not. I think it was Alan Kay who once said something like personal computers are primarily communication devices. In those early days of popular computing, people found ways to use their computers to communicate without the internet. You could connect a modem (MOdulator-DEModulator), and it converted data into sound to send (slowly) through the telephone lines. Telephones in those days had “lines.” You used your computer and modem to communicate with a community, which was mostly computer hobbyists.

Personal computer communities back then were local, partly because of the way the telephone system worked. The farther away the telephone number you were calling, the more expensive the call would be. Communities were more limited in size because of that, and because the systems you were “dialing into” weren’t centralized systems; they were “bulletin board” software running on somebody else’s personal computer. Some of them installed extra phone lines just for their bulletin board, but otherwise the systems weren’t even available all the time. The rest of the family still had to use the phone the normal way, after all.

Because bulletin board communities were local, small, and decentralized, they were adaptable. If the operator of a bulletin board system needed to pause their service, another community member could stand up a similar (or even identical) system. The resources were easily available and small enough to be manageable. The community had a significant degree of control of its communication system.

In the present day, online communities have far less control over their communication systems because the systems are centralized and under vendor (or employer) control. The informal communities within formal organizations illustrate this. Members can be banished with no input from the community itself. Systems of communication can be changed arbitrarily, again with no community input. Maybe the formal organization negotiated a contract with a different vendor. Or even decided to implement their own communication system. Regardless, the communities depending on the systems, and on their members, have no say. It’s the same situation described in 1923 by Thorstein Veblen in Absentee Ownership.

Absentee ownership, particularly of land, has historically caused problems. In Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries, and in Prince Edward Island, Canada in the 19th century, absentee ownership led to unrest, strikes, the revolutionary period in Ireland, and eventually reforms. Georgism and mutualism argue against the whole idea.

Absentee ownership of community resources, whether land or means of communication, undermines the ability of communities to adapt, and in that way reduces some aspects of their resilience. Informal communities that sustain formal organizations may be clear illustrations of this. Community members banished because of financial decisions by the formal organization may in some cases want the informal community to continue in some form, but because the means of communication — of communing — are not controlled by the community itself, it’s quite rare for the community to survive.

It could be argued that this is purposeful, and is a strategy employed by those in power in the formal organization to reduce or eliminate any growth of power among the information communities fueling the organization. A labor union could certainly be classified as a kind of organization within a formal organization, although it would not generally be considered completely informal. But that’s a subject for another time.