This site is a way to collect my thoughts on organising as it is practiced. Some of it will be not much more than notes, other posts will be reposts of things said elsewhere, others will be more expanded. It is about the culture and methods and ethics of organisations. It will hopefully be a collaborative effort and any ideas or comments are welcome. The aim is to come at organisation from a certain viewpoint and the following is what I was thinking about when I started the site:
We live with different levels of organisation: the obvious orgs like corporations or charities or political organisations, but also the government, which is a form of organisation that in particular tends not to operate as described. We also have the systemic level, the global links and networks which comprise a form of organisation in their own right.
Often from the point of view of these orgs people appear only temporarily, or only in part. Often people both inside and outside organisations are disposable, or their worlds are not imagined or conceptualised or considered. We appear as ghosts, lacking reality, within the solid machinery of ‘necessary’ organisation.
Due to the forms of economic organising dominant in the world (emphatically nothing to do with free markets) we often see people, time, culture, transformed into a commodity. But we see too wider relational and ethical failures that stem from our forms of organisation
Presumably good organisation would convert individual and collective desires into action in the world. It seems to me that our current forms of organisation do this badly, or perhaps only meet the desires of a small percentage of the planet. That there are alternative ways of organising should be obvious, yet even people engaged in politics often have a great blind spot when it comes to taking on the details of organisations, or they mandate one perfect way of organising, or they talk about them as great monolithic things that will live forever in their current forms, a viewpoint encouraged by many organisations themselves, in which leaders do not want to see too much questioning.
The aim of this blog will not be to propose some perfect organisational form that everyone should adopt but to ask questions about how we can conceptualise and change the organisations we currently live with.