Michael McConkey "Exploring the MIFO Age"

Anyone following this blog should know that I don’t concede an inch on the tired old debate between centralism-hierarchy-pyramid networks-command and control, on the one hand, and decentralism-markets-scale-free networks-autonomous exchange on the other hand. Without doubt, the historical struggles in organizational and social life have been largely defined in these terms, but that definition was always one dimensional and overly simplistic. There was of course always a third variable at work, which might be characterized as decentralism-association-peer networks-collaboration. Though, I also don’t see this third variable as some magic elixir, as many do. The success of MIFO depends precisely on finding a sweet spot in the organizational space of the resulting triangle. That’s a topic to address in future posts.

However, having said all that, I do think that markets have much more to offer to the solution than is frequently acknowledged. The problem is that so many working in organizational theory seem to be intellectually steeped in the problematic “Progressive” tradition, which has consistently stigmatized, vilified, even demonized, markets as cesspools of wanton greed. I want, then, to just say a few words here in defence of markets and their contributions. First, we really have to get over this ridiculous Progressive propaganda. Greed, really? Sure, people can act greedily, with or without markets, that’s just the human condition, but does “greed” accurately characterize the vast majority of market exchanges? When you go to your local grocer to buy some tomatoes and onions, is that exchange being informed by greed? Even if you assess the relative value of different tomatoes, hoping to get a better price, is that greed? I can go along with the dictionary’s definition of greed as excessive desire. I don’t understand what’s excessive about making an exchange with someone. My local grocer is run by a hard working immigrant family. I’m sure they make a decent income from it, but they work pretty damn hard, too. I don’t consider them to be acting out of greed any more than I am in trying to get the best value I can if shopping to make a nice dinner for my daughter. This vilification of market activity is just ridiculous in my estimation.

Furthermore, contrary to the Progressive myth, the great classical liberal economists did not defend the market as appealing to crude human greed machines, operating exclusively on economic calculations. The fact is that the Smiths, Lockes, Humes always had a profoundly moral dimension to their defence of markets. And, I would say, rightly so. The private property rights underpinning markets have always been bound up with individuality, privacy, personal security, cooperation and political freedom. That is just as important as the economic value of maximizing the utility of resources, individually and collectively. Obviously markets are not perfect, laissez faire markets are impossible, and there are situations under which markets do not work well, jeopardizing both aggregate and individual interests. The knee-jerk vilification of them, though, by so many on the self-styled left is simply ignorant.

The greatest irony of all this, though, is that the very same trendy, “liberal” cyber-hipsters who endlessly extol the virtues of the new internet age will be among the more relentless in their smarmy, ironic dismissal of markets as some dinosaur form of social organization. The real irony though is at their expense; such people’s blind market-hatred, distorting their view of the topic, prevents their realization that the market was the original Web 2.0 platform.  I understand that Web 2.0 is a little contentious, in both its meaning and implications. However, I don’t think I can go wrong in using Tim O’Reilly’s definition. In a nutshell: 2.0 is where users’ usage create what they use. Google, Wikipedia, Bit Torrent, etc., and all the others are captured by this definition. Every time you search something on Google, by choosing a search result, you contribute to future search results, in contributing to Wikipedia entries the users create the entries they use. This of course is exactly what markets have always done.

This might not be immediately clear to some because of the confusion arising from the Progressive distortion about what markets do. The emphasis on greed points attention to the exchanges facilitated by markets, where, supposedly, everyone is screwing everyone else – buying those damn tomatoes. Consequently, many people are confused into thinking that markets produce trades, but that isn’t ever true. No market has ever produced a trade. Actors (individual or collective) make trades. Confusing this would be like saying that Google produces all those web sites that come up in a search. What Google produces are search hierarchies. What markets produce, of course, are prices. And, fascinatingly, markets produce these prices in a manner extraordinarily similar to the function of the internet.

From every little corner of the network, information is accumulated that, in a vast decentred coordination system, calculates and circulates the prices arising from these thousands upon millions of inputs. People have to take actions in the world. Each time an individual has to decide to buy, build, sell or settle, they consult this collectively generated price as part of, though rarely the only factor in, their decision. However, once that decision is made, and an action is taken – to buy or sell something, to build it themselves or to settle without – that action becomes part of the knowledge pool of the market network. By the very taking of the action – even if to not enter the market – the actor contributes to the decentred knowledge coordination and contributes to the ever remade price. What’s the difference between this and contributing to the hierarchical rankings of search results on Google? The users’ usage creates what they use.

Markets certainly don’t have all the answers. To effectively evaluate their contribution to organizational and social challenges, though, the narrow-minded, knee-jerk Progressive demonization of markets has to be put aside to better understand their cultural, moral and communicative, as well as they’re extremely important economic, virtues.

Any reader of this blog will have gathered that I have a propensity for abstract theory. I enjoy it. I always loved that line from A Beautiful Mind, referring to the joys of “cerebral revellery.” I know what that’s about. However, I hope it’s also clear that I have no patience for sterile abstruseness – especially of the smug, holier than though, Frankfurt School or postmodernist variety. I’m interested in abstract theory precisely because I believe it presents the opportunity to approach practical problems with fresh eyes and thereby can contribute to solutions to real world problems. Clearly I’m never about to have a lot of sympathizers. The abstruse theorists would consider me a sell-out to the culture industry, while the pragmatic realists would consider me some self-indulgent mentalist. So be it. Still, I do believe there is value in the kind of approach that I promote. The case of assemblage theory offers an interesting test.

Here’s a case of an immensely abstract theory, which is unapologetically theoretically constructed, and might well, at first blush, appear to be the height of academic self-indulgent and abstract sterility from the perspective of real life organizational practice. Once understood, though, might even it offer some concrete lessons for the practical application of organizational strategy?

To be clear: there is no doubt that assemblage theory is totally theoretically constructed. That, though, is true of all social and organizational theory. This is not to deny that there are objective, material realities always at work in organizations. Any understanding of those realities, though, which is not merely a detailed description of specific forces and intensities, that aspires to understand how or why things are happening, has to start with imagining a model that might make sense of the material reality and testing it out on the facts. This is no different than in the physical sciences. All knowledge is deductive: we create the models first in our heads. This doesn’t mean that it’s all make-believe. The most promising models are invariably those arising from considerable learning and reflection; they are informed guesses and speculations. What Newton or Einstein did, inventing the models in their heads, before testing those models out against the material world, is no different in that regard from what we are doing here with assemblage theory.

I draw my understanding of assemblage theory from the work of Manuel DeLanda. However, just as he both acknowledges his debt and disowns any obligation to the inspiration of Deleuze, I feel exactly the same way about DeLanda. I want to give him credit for his contribution and influence, but feel no need to defend my explication of the theory as an accurate expression of his elaboration. That sort of thing, to my mind, is insipid. I describe below what I consider to be assemblage theory. Anyone who feels I’ve not been true to either Deleuze or DeLanda are welcome to complain, but it’s of no interest to me. As Popper used to say, the theoretical position I’m describing is the one I want to discuss, call it something else if you want. What it’s called has nothing to do with the qualities I want to explore.

In assemblage theory, social phenomena (and, though, not intrinsically restricted to the social, that’s the restriction I’ll be employing here) can be divided into three categories: entities, components and assemblages. No sooner is that statement made as it demands clarification and qualification. These three categories are, in fact, not separate things, but denote shifting forms of identity and relationship. Entities come together to create assemblages. In that capacity, entities are components of those assemblages. Assemblages, however, exist for differing lengths of time and for different purposes. It is, thus, perfectly reasonable to regard assemblages as entities in their own right. And, as such entities, they too can come together with other entities to create yet new assemblages. These identities and relationships, therefore, are occurring at multiple levels.

To expand a bit on an analogy that DeLanda invokes, Lance Armstrong at work could be thought of as an assemblage comprised of the following components: a man, a bicycle, a firm strip of ground and forces of gravitational balance. All these different entities have to be assembled in the right way to achieve the assemblage which is Lance Armstrong at work. Though, of course, far more complex in its components, the same thing is true of any organization. A complex of people, rituals, routines, mechanisms, values, resources and so on come together in a certain way to constitute the assemblage which is any particular organization. This isn’t a particularly startling observation. Also, not especially novel is the recognition that organizations can then themselves become entities in their own right, which, among other things, can come together with other such entities to form new assemblages. Commercial firms can join industry or trade associations, sports leagues can join federations of leagues, political lobbying groups can join issue alliances, national governments can join international regulatory bodies, and so on.  Likewise, the process can be unfolded in the other direction. Organizations can be regarded, at least in part, as the assembly of other smaller entity organizations, such as task forces, special operating units, interdepartmental committees, etc. Clearly, there’s modularity to organizational structure and practice. If this was all that assemblage theory had to teach, it would be of little consequence.

However, before going straight to that, we need to remind ourselves that not all assemblages are treated the same. A conversation is an assemblage of at least two people, a context, at least one language and a set of concepts. However, this is true of all conversations: the one between a customer and a cashier in the grocery store and another that goes on for years or even decades, such as that between Freud and Fliess or between Adams and Jefferson. The fleeting assemblage that was my brief discussion with the cashier at my local mini-mart this morning has come and gone and no one has paid it much attention. Indeed, I’m here paying it far more attention than the overwhelming majority of people who had such conversations today are likely doing. And even this examination has become exhausted after a few sentences. Those other conversations, mentioned above, though, have of course been the subject of study, analysis, books and conferences of many kinds, over many years. We don’t treat all assemblages the same and consequently their perceived significance weighs upon us quite differently. This, take note, is not merely a function of duration or quantity. 9/11 was an assemblage, involving office towers, early bird workers, hijacked airplanes and religious fanatic mass murderers, to cite only the most salient components. Yet, horrific as its death toll was, in purely quantitative terms and as a matter of enduring process, the annual U.S. death toll from car collisions or heart disease dwarves that of 9/11. Those, too, despite how spread they are in time and space, are assemblages, say, of cars, roads, sometimes weather, sometimes alcohol, sometimes sleep deprivation, sometimes recklessness.  And yet for obvious psychological and strategic reasons 9/11 is the assemblage that has far and away attracted the most attention from a diversity of perspectives.

So, while all assemblages are ultimately the same – an assembly of entities as components to constitute this new whole – they are not regarded with equal attention. Though this is usually understandable, it also can have unrecognized consequences. So, returning to the point above, the existence of organizations and the fact that there can be hierarchies or modules in the relation between organizations is well recognized. These are assemblages that have attracted much attention. We spent a lot of time thinking about organizations: organizational structure, organizational strategy, organizational behaviour, organizational communications, organizational change, and so on. We compare degrees of centralization and decentralization. We examine their interaction with networks and their system complexity. But the assemblages that we call organizations are not co-terminus with the assemblages that impact the purpose and objectives of those organizations.

Sometimes organizations have to deal with a government regulator, or more than one. Indeed, sometimes the rules of those regulators reinforce or contradict each other. Some organizations co-produce services or goods with other organizations requiring institutions such as cross-organizational teams, standards committees, shared staff, etc. Some organizations have to negotiate with professional associations. Some organizations have their work coupled with other organizations in a variety of ways. Managers have to balance vertical and horizontal demands and expectations. Auditors have to assess intersecting financial responsibilities. Engineers have to divulge proprietary information. Some organizations integrate feedback of customers, clients or citizens. Some have to cooperate across barriers of very different organizational sensibilities: public sector, private sector, non-profit sector, etc. Some share knowledge, some share processes, some share resources. All of these are kinds of assemblages. Each one is no less an entity in its own right than are any of the organizations that serves as components in them. It is not our habit to think this way. But, like the component organizations, these other assemblages have a material reality. They too have specific structures, strategies, communication and behaviour patterns and dynamics of change.

If these processes, which are all part of the larger MIFO age, are to be successful, we will have to start thinking much more deliberately and consistently about these assemblages as entities in themselves. As much attention as is shown to organizations – how and why they do and don’t work, what are their various forms, when and where do those forms transform – we have to start applying with equal seriousness to these other assemblages. Those who might protest that these other assemblages are far more diverse and complex than organizations simply are blind to the reality of organizations. The term organization is a simplifying abstraction that gives us a handle with which to get an initial grip. But to take such a term at face value is to entirely miss the diversity of styles, regimes and codes of the many organizations of contemporary life, to say nothing of the even greater fecundity and conflict embodied in the constant flow and flux of these elements through the history of any particular organization. Simplification is perhaps inevitably a function of striving to understand, but it shouldn’t be allowed to inhibit our capacity to see the actual assemblages of contemporary organizational life for what they are and what their important is.

And, it seems to me, that thinking of them as assemblages, emerging as new entities, is the first step in that direction. So, at least for now, I’m going to come down on the side of utility.

The title to this posting may seem rather, even doubly, anomalous to the reader familiar with the blog’s themes. First, what does this have to do with MIFO and, second, how could anyone suggest that Einstein was in any way under-rated? Well, under-rated is precisely what I will argue Einstein is. As to the relevance to the blog, maybe it’s a bit tenuous. But regular followers of the blog will know that my approach to organizational theory is very much concerned with abstract reasoning – getting beyond the received wisdom about organizational practice and seeing into the deeper inner workings of the processes. Additionally, like Einstein’s relativity, MIFO derives its unique virtues from the fact that there is no absolute, fixed configuration of knowing possible; each context requires its own configuring of knowledge relevant to the prevailing circumstances. This is the same whether one is trying to measure time in different contexts or finding solutions to problems in unstable organizational circumstances.

In this way, Einstein’s contribution to MIFO studies is important both in spirit and in fact. He both sets the tone and lays the material basis for MIFO studies. So, this brief ode to him is certainly relevant to the theme of the blog. And, as will be seen, it is precisely in the ways that he has been underappreciated that constituted his greatest contribution to MIFO and organizational studies.

Again, though, how could one suggest that Einstein was under-rated: he is the most famous scientist and quite arguably the most famous intellectual of all time? The problem is that all that fame is uninformed. Here’s the extraordinary thing about Einstein: he completely changed the historical course of not one, but two separate disciplines. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that he’s the greatest single thinker in the history of the world. But, again, being an icon of popular culture is irrelevant to proper appreciation of his accomplishments.

Most people are aware that he made a major contribution to physics – some even have a vague notion of what that contribution was. That of course was a major achievement and if that was the extent of his legacy, the verdict would certainly have to be that he was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. My point, and the focus of the rest of this posting, is that his achievement in and contribution to physics was equalled (if not surpassed) by his achievement in and contribution to epistemology. Indeed, it’s arguable that this latter was the more important contribution! Of course, without the success in physics, his contributions to epistemology may well never have been taken seriously. However, while most of us still go on, day after day, basically living in a Newtonian universe, in which Einstein’s contribution to physics has no appreciable impact on our daily lives, his contributions to epistemology have had a pervasive impact – changing the way we all live and think. Whether we’re conscious of it or not?

The contribution to epistemology – reasoning about the defensible grounds for reasoning – was in some senses even more remarkable as he broke not one, but two new paths in the field. Appreciating the first of these requires us to recall the response to his initial famous essays about a hundred years ago, now. Today, the popular culture version of the story has it that the reaction against Einstein was that he was overthrowing one of physics’, and science’s, great deities. No doubt there is some truth in this interpretation, but, for the previous decade or so, some serious questions had been raised which Newtonian mechanics didn’t seem to adequately address. It wasn’t so surprising that Newton was being challenged at that point. And, of course, there was some consternation that this challenge came from a nobody: someone with no standing in the scientific community. But all that was in second place; the biggest ground of contention with Einstein, presumably related to this later fact, was the allegation that what he’d done wasn’t science, at all.

Where was the laboratory work? Science was supposed to be working experimentally with the material world. This guy came along and wrote up a handful of mathematically speculative essays and this is supposed to be science? Many dismissed his work as mere philosophy – and metaphysical philosophy at that. But, of course, it was science. What was special here was the unapologetic deductive nature of his work. As Karl Popper has demonstrated, this is of course how science always has and must work. But scientists didn’t see themselves that way. Rather they’d been misled by the writings of their great early cheerleader, Francis Bacon, with all his gushing about the fundamental role of observation to science. Observation, of course, has its place as does experiment, but as Popper demonstrated, scientific knowledge can never come from that. Observation and experiment have to be put to use as instruments for the testing of hypotheses that already derive from the educated imagination: scientific knowledge is deductive.

This may have always been true of science, it may in fact be in the very DNA of science, but Einstein was the first to unapologetically, unabashedly, base his scientific work and reputation on deductive reasoning. Of course, the theory still had to stand up to tests in the material world. Einstein knew that as well as anyone and already knew what those tests would have to be when he proposed the theory. And, of course, in 1919, during the Eddington expedition his theories did past the experimental tests. And, on that day, when the experimental tests in the natural world showed that Einstein’s mathematical speculation provided more successful predictions than Newton’s (supposedly) observational scientific practice, everything changed in the self-understanding of intellectual life about what constituted science and how knowledge could be discovered. This contribution, alone, would have put him among the giants in epistemology. As I’ve said, though, that was only one of his two contributions to the field.

The second was the extraordinarily unique worldview of knowledge which he proposed and had confirmed on that day in 1919 on the Portuguese island. To my knowledge, Einstein is the first person in history to propose a worldview that separated the validity claims for epistemology and ontology. In all of previous history, everyone else had based their understanding of both fields upon the same validity claims. By this I mean, one was either a relativist or a realist. If a relativist, one’s view of both epistemology and ontology was relativist: we can’t know an absolute truth, because there’s no absolute reality to know. Or, if a realist: there is an absolute reality, so we can gain absolute truth of it. Obviously, through history, there has been nuance, gray areas, spectrums, and so on. At the core, though, these were the positions available for thinking.

It was Einstein who uncoupled these apparently inseparable domains. He was an ontological relativist, as the title of his famous theories implies. Changing circumstances change the configuration of the dimensions of what we would call reality. From a philosophical perspective, Einstein’s biggest break from Newton was in that while the latter held firmly to a background independent view of the world, Einstein had demonstrated a background dependent view: the background didn’t exist as an independent variable, but was constituted out of the relationships between the elements of reality. Ontologically, this was certainly a relativist position. Again, such views were not unique, one thinks of Leibniz’s ontology as a kind of forerunner. And of course today we’re inundated with science studies types who gush over their mutual relativist bona fides.

What made Einstein’s contribution so remarkable was that, despite his uncompromising ontological relativism, he was an equally ardent epistemological realist. Rather than surrendering to soft-headed intuition – if the material world were composed of relativist relationships, how could anyone know anything? – he insisted on the know-ability of even that which was relative, in the context of its relativity. Just because reality was slippery, didn’t make it any less real, and if it were real, it was subject to understanding. This was logically implied in his very creation of the famous essays themselves. Notwithstanding the relativity of dimensions and their background dependence, he was able to make predictions about the bending of light in the tangible world. In this sense, the apparent inconsistency of his ontology and epistemology was actually much more consistent than the odd exceptionalism of the postmodernists and poststructuralist – in which all forms of knowing are unmasked as foundationless and meaningless (except of course the one form of knowing making this claim for foundationlessness and meaninglessness).

The key difference for Einstein was that being relative didn’t imply being random. That radical change of dimensional circumstances could completely defy one’s ability to understand a specific context, did not preclude the ability to understand that defied ability nor to understand why and how it happened. If Einstein believed the universe were random, then a realist epistemology would have been impossible, but then, so would have been the success of his essays on relativity. If that logical proposition isn’t adequate, one need only look at his debates with Bohr over the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The latter, despite its almost universal acceptance, again in the same popular culture that carelessly lionizes Einstein, is intellectually impoverished and actually fails the test of science. This is something else I’ll blog on in the weeks to come. The point here, though, was Einstein’s position in the debate, famously summed up in his quip about God not playing dice with the universe. As Einstein had explained elsewhere, if he in fact believed in a god at all it was Spinoza’s god – not the kind that intervenes in wars and sporting events. Spinoza’s god is better understood as a kind of motive force, a tendency within the universe. One might think of the tendency in natural selection toward ever greater fecundity and diversity. There’s no guiding hand or wise overseer here. There is though an idea that certain tendencies are at work in the unfolding of the world. They may be manifested in countless, elusive ways, but their very existence reveals that the world is not random. If the phenomena of the world were random, predictive science would be impossible.

It was this theoretical leap of Einstein’s – acknowledging a world that couldn’t be reduced to billiard ball mechanics, on the one hand, and yet, despite that relativity, was still subject to the knowledge of the searching mind – that allowed him to advance his unprecedented worldview: ontological relativist, epistemological realist. As we look at MIFO practices, with their emphasis upon precisely the contingency of shifting problem complexes, which defy reduction to simple recipes prescribed by hierarchical authorities, but, still, are subject to a moving, adaptive solution space, generated out of the nimble search to understand the problems in their existing configuration, it should become clear that, in addition to all the other laurels dispensed to him here, minor as it might be on the totem of his great achievements, Einstein is as well the intellectual father of MIFO theory.

In an earlier post on this blog, July 10, I discussed Open Method of Coordination (OMC) as a manifestation of MIFO (multi-directional iterative feedback organization/s). In this post, I want to explore the connection more closely, specifically OMC as a kind of elementary sub-form of MIFO. OMC, we’ll see, is a form of MIFO, but a form that is significantly limited in its dynamism. This is not a criticism, nor even a shortcoming. For its intended purposes, these limitations provide benefits. However, OMC only hints at what is possible and actual in the more dynamic forms of MIFO. Understanding OMC serves then as a useful introduction to the more expansive superior category of which it is a sub-form. As we’ll see, OMC is based upon periodic and routine iterative feedback, while MIFO, in the most expansive version, is based upon constant and meta-routine iterative feedback. This latter claim will require some explanation, of course, but first let’s review the nature and function of OMC.

In the earlier post, I introduced OMC as a MIFO development that has been most saliently explored in the public sector, at least by that name, and I briefly discuss the example of the Chicago School system that is drawn upon by Charles Sabel in one of his many discussions of this topic. In getting a conceptual handle on OMC, we might think of it as a kind of laboratory clearinghouse. To quickly reiterate, in that example, the individual schools and the board of education collaborate to establish agreed upon, realistic, basic, very broad outcome goals. Then each individual school is free to pursue those goals by whatever means its members/stakeholders see fit – abiding, of course, by understood ethical standards to prevent harm. The board continues to play a role in providing advice, resources or even training where necessary. After all, the schools now have responsibilities for which they may have no prior experience. In the absence of any threat of harm to anyone under the board’s responsibility, the schools are provided extreme latitude in finding their own way toward the designated goals. In the process, then, each individual school becomes a separate laboratory of organizational innovation.

The schools, or the local unit in whatever application, have specific responsibilities, which include a thorough documentation of what they did, how and why they did it, along with measurements of their performance and results. At the end of a pre-stipulated period, in the case of the Chicago school system it was three years, the central body comes back to the front of the stage: the central office gathers, audits, evaluates and, most importantly, makes available through a user-friendly medium, the information and experience produced from this broad scale series of experiments. The fruition of this process is an ambitious collaborative internal benchmarking in which all participating units are able to review and assess what worked, where, how, and under what conditions. In this way, the board – or central agency, in any application of the practice – acts as a clearinghouse for the findings produced by all the individual laboratories: in our example, the individual schools.

As one of the underlying motives for this approach is the understanding that distinct local circumstances mitigate the effectiveness of centrally imposed systems, there is no movement from here to a centrally enforced regime based on the resulting best practices. Rather, each individual school studies the most successful practices for ideas of how they can improve their own practice. If their circumstances permit a wholesale implementation, all for the best, but, if not, there is still the opportunity to discern what elements of others’ practices – identified as best or not – that they might retrofit to their own local needs. With the learning benefits absorbed, the process resumes. Each individual unit tries to apply lessons learned to improve their performance over the subsequent period, until the assessment and learning phase starts again. And so on.

In the earlier post, I developed these ideas to highlight how OMC constituted a genuine transcending of the now obsolete rhetoric of centralism-decentralism as a zero-sum game. Here, instead, I want to emphasize the process. As mentioned above, we have a multi-directional (as, via the centre, the schools all communicate with each other, in a vast geometry of channels, about what has resulted) iterative (in that it is done repeatedly, every three years) feedback (in that after every designated period each school gets to see again how its innovations stack up in light of those taken elsewhere, creating further opportunity to learn) organization/s. This integral marriage of best practices, benchmarking, continuous improvement and organizational learning, therefore, does create a MIFO. However, it is periodic, in that it is only every three years, and it is routine, as it is a very set process, with a precise series of steps, as delineated above.

To repeat, this is not a criticism. The periodic delimitation makes sense in that the schools need time to implement any intended changes and to see and measure how those changes play out. Patience for results pays dividends if they provide an appropriate horizon to assess the trajectory of the experiments and innovations. Likewise, the exceedingly large numbers of partners in the process (in Chicago, some 550 schools) and the generally conservative mindset of public institutions, who have to answer to vastly more “shareholders” (i.e., taxpayers) than even the largest private organizations, makes the use of highly delineated, thoroughly documented and painstakingly transparent routines both inevitable and probably necessary. And, of course, a focus upon routine encourages standardized periodic scales.

However, for all that, OMC is considerably constrained in the degree of its dynamism. To fully grasp the potential of MIFO and recognize just how radically it is reinventing modern organizational life, we have to use this sketch of OMC as a jumping off point, from which we do move on beyond it to the richer dynamism of MIFO experimentalism. Sketching a history of MIFO, something I am working on, is complicated and subject to regular revision as scholars reconsider what had been previously taken for granted as vertically integrated, hierarchical and/or bureaucratic processes. For instance, for a long time, the story was that MIFO first began to emerge in the 1970s, in Japanese automaking and U.S. computer enterprise. However, research has since shown that in fact many of the core ingredients of MIFO were already activated in the U.S. auto industry of the 1920s, in some instances lasting right through to WWII. So, there’s no easy sketch or definition to be drawn from history.

At a theoretical level, too, diversity militates against conceptual conviviality: Charles Sabel, Lynn Applegate, John Paul MacDuffie, Jonathan Zeitlin, Charles Heckscher, Susan Helper, Gilles Paquet and Keith Sawyer are just some of the scholars whose differing approaches, methodologies and conceptualizations have all funnelled into my understanding of MIFO. I don’t claim that the model that I sketch below would be consistent with all their analyses, nor, depending upon one’s chronologic framing, does my rough ideal type provide a guide to charting the permutations of organizational history. Still, the discussion has to begin somewhere, so I provide below, as I say, a kind of rough draft ideal type. Ultimately, understanding its practice, theory and history is the object of my long term research project.

The most radical expression of MIFO is found in those organizations that find themselves in need of, either, rapid adaptation or continual innovation. Hierarchies are designed to best ensure the fulfilment of established routines. They are good at mobilizing effort in established, standard methods, which is why they have been so prevalent in the era of mass standardized production under relatively stable social, economic and technological conditions: the long term amortization required to make economic the high fixed costs of such production suited such organizational processes. However, when condition become less stable and, either, rapid adaptation or continual innovation is required, hierarchies are not so affective. The very stability and repeatability that they institute under more stable, often monopolist market conditions, impede adaptation and innovation, and the economics of long term amortization no longer work. Additionally, rapid adaptation’s and constant innovation’s requirement for a far more complex knowledge space, created specifically to allow an option diversity that is anathema to hierarchies’ command and control methods, defy the capacity to be thoroughly grasped and comprehensively managed by a handful of top executives.

The only way for this approach to work is by bringing together those with the appropriate knowledge, to work, directly, together. This creates opportunities and challenges. The opportunities lie in the unprecedented synergy made possible through the direct collaboration of aficionados of multiple disciplines. That too, alas, is also the challenge. On the one hand, a new level of creative dynamism is made possible, but, on the other hand, achieving that creative dynamism requires finding a way of negotiating the insular vocabularies, assumptions and even cultures of such diverse disciplines. Under these conditions, managers have to learn how to make the transition from that of being delegators of tasks to that of facilitators of dialogue. One of the most famous examples of such processes is the relationship between “original equipment manufacturers” (OEM) and their partner component builders. At various times in history, including and especially now, demands for adaptation or innovation have required high levels of collaboration between such partners. These collaborative processes, such as iterative design and simultaneous engineering, require high levels of information sharing and mutual teaching.

It is by these means that the various disciplines can mesh without need of a parsing and delegating authority. However, the professionalism of the disciplines, combined with safeguards for assurance about the effectiveness of such meshing, has also entailed the use of a variety of methods that – as unthinkable as it may seem to the traditional hierarchical organization – actually undermine routines. The meshing of these different disciplines and knowledges require a spirit of invention and experimentation which does not settle for mundane implementation of the fruits of such efforts. Indeed, much of the old hierarchical separation of conception and execution is eclipsed under these new MIFO regimes. Among the key practices to take note of here are benchmarking, error detection and reduction and just in time production flows. All of these are means by which existing routine practices can be challenged for their degree of excellence in meeting state of the art performance. So, both the actual dialogue of creation between the disciplines and the practical implementation of the resulting work are marked by processes that routinely challenge the existing state of routine in the organizational practice.

Such processes then are multi-directional (the disciplines are in constant dialogue amongst themselves, as they mutually adapt to each others’ innovations, while interacting with design and production teams and processes, all responding to the findings from routine challenges in the products and their production) iterative (in that all these processes are repeated constantly in dialogue about implementing the newest state of the art knowledge in products and production, as well as testing of their effectiveness) feedback (as the dialogue among the disciplines are always incrementing new insights back to each other about how designs can be better engineered, and the results of routine-challenging design and production processes provide further gist for the mill of collaborative design and engineering) organization/s. However, unlike the OMC, these MIFO are starkly different in the level of their dynamism precisely because, rather than being routine, they are meta-routine. The only routines which are not subject to challenge in these MIFO are those routines that constantly challenge the taken for granted routines of design, engineering and production. There are no fixed processes or schedules that exceed the bounds of creative challenge. And, in this way, too, these MIFO are not, like OMC, periodic in their operation, but rather operate in a realm of constant challenging and reinventing.

There are still elements of OMC at work in many of these more dynamic organizations. For instance, the benchmarking, which is so important to the meta-routine processes for both design and production, are often based upon information from industry or sector associations or institutes, through which individual organizations that agree to share their own performance specs are able to gain access to those of all other such organizations, who have agreed to the same arrangement. In this way, such institutes or associations play a clearinghouse role not dissimilar to that played by the school board in the example above.

However, for the most part, we can say that while OMC provides an illuminating entrance into understanding the basic elements and mechanisms of MIFO, to fully grasp the dynamic potential in these increasingly important and influential organizational forms and practices, we have to look beyond those practices that are restricted to routine operations under a periodic schedule. We have to grapple with trying to understand the complex dynamics and emergent results of these far more dynamic, boundary-eroding, organizational manifestations of the MIFO phenomenon. We have to go beyond OMC, into the MIFO age.

By the time I entered grad school, in the mid-80s, Karl Popper seemed to be largely disposed of. The zeitgeist felt against him. I wasn’t in a philosophy department, but insofar as such questions do, and most self-consciously, in those days, did bear upon the wider debates in the social sciences and humanities, there was certainly acknowledgement of Popper holding a certain place. The overall gesture of The Open Society and Its Enemies, I think, was appreciated – in that slightly weary way that it was always good to be against Nazis. But wasn’t there a certain sense that he’d carried things just a bit far. And, in any case, at the root of those arguments were the more basic ones about the character of science, evidence, knowledge and truth. And, hadn’t those debates all been carried by others: Wittgenstein and Kuhn, particularly?

By the time I was a grad student, it felt to me that the consensus verdict of the academy’s collective judgment was that Popper was a kind of noble, but failed, effort. In the end, wasn’t he upholding positivism, with its implicit devotion to the very impossible Truth that had been so thoroughly discredited by the reigning wisdom of the various relativist schools of scholarship? And didn’t that fruitless and doomed clinging to an outdated and exhausted philosophy carry in it, like secret assailants stealthily stowed away in a wooden horse, the return of the Scientist as high priest of Truth: the return, in fact, of modernity as Holocaust, the Enlightenment as domination? Wasn’t Popper in fact the fading prophet of rigid hierarchy, authoritarian science, public policy by the fiat of allegedly benevolent experts? This was certainly the impression of Popper that I absorbed at that time.

These considerations, of course, have relevance for debates over MIFO governance, dialogue and organization in more than one way. Certainly, a major driver in debates relating to MIFO has been a concern for the need to more thoroughly integrate greater diversity into decision making processes, tapping into a more fertile cross section of opinion and discussion generally. This was in large part because it has become increasingly acknowledged that public or private policy and the risks that it may entail cannot be determined by any strictly logical formula. What risks and choices are acceptable, at the end of the day, comes down to value judgments. No scientist, no expert, has any privileged insight into which of the available options are the best for any organization or community, much less for the larger society. Science can inform such decision making; it cannot determine it.

As important as that is to the debates over organizational governance generally, and organizational communication in particular, there is an even more fundamental concern here: if the effectiveness of MIFO processes, which, as will be discussed at greater length in postings to come, constitute the potential of a dramatic change in the direction, form and practice of organizational administration and management, and will inevitably present serious challenges around matters of legitimacy and transparency, how are the merits of such dramatic change to be evaluated? Scientific method may not be the only valid consideration in such an evaluation, but can it be simply dismissed? There is certainly a problem with an excessive focus, in the evaluation of organizational governance, on perhaps too narrow a concern for what is quantifiable and measurable. However, a science of some kind cannot be dismissed: any legitimate and accountable use of stockholders’ or taxpayers’ money has to demonstrate tangible benefit. Especially in the public sector, value for money may not be the highest consideration, but wanton waste and/or incompetence are surely not defendable. Again, science may not have the last word, but it must be heard.

Finally, though it may strike some involved in the workaday tangles of making contemporary organization work as a tad esoteric, if we are concerned with MIFO governance specifically as, in significant part, a kind of archipelago of fora for dialogue – among teams, departments, partners, governments, customers, NGOs, citizens, etc., depending upon the context – then, surely, in any re-evaluation of Popper we must not neglect those noble, but supposedly failed, arguments about the nature of an open society. And, while Popper’s concern was primarily directed to public policy and governance, as many second generation theorists of knowledge management, like Mark McElroy, argue, the same principles of the open society, applied to commercial organizations, invoking the ideal of the open enterprise, are just as important for the success of MIFO in the private sector.  The mere existence of those fora does not, in itself, guarantee or demonstrate commercial success or the existence of democracy; it is what goes on within them that tells the tale.

Though I went right through my graduate studies and well beyond them without giving too much thought to the fate of poor old Karl, I have to admit there was always something, some inkling, which kept nagging at me. Even in my rather crude, and all too mediated, understanding of his ideas, there were a couple notions that I kept finding myself being drawn back to, despite the apparent definitiveness of the verdict on the part of my intellectual mentors. These were the ideas of falsifiability and historicism. There won’t be occasion to address the latter head-on here – though, I expect it will arise in passing.

For Popper, falsifiability marked the separation of science from other forms of knowledge. Contrary to the relativist critics I recall from my grad school days, this did not entail some privileging of science as a capital “S” science with claims to superior knowledge. Rather, it merely made the obvious point that if science were to mean something particular, if it was to be distinguished from other forms of knowledge – and if not what was the point of even using the word, ideological rhetoric aside – then something had to demarcate what was and wasn’t science.

I’ve never been able to see beyond the need for the idea of falsifiability. In an era when the stature of science has been so diminished in public esteem, it is hardly surprising that much gets away with passing itself off as science. But, again, if science means something there must be some litmus test. For Popper, that was falsifiability. To be scientific, a theory must have built into it, arising from its own internal logic, the very conditions required to prove it false. Popper was greatly influenced by Einstein; here was an immensely abstract thinker in the process of overthrowing the accepted consensus on physics for the previous two centuries and yet, notwithstanding the theoretical density of his arguments, he knew and identified the practical physical experiments that needed to be conducted to create the conditions for falsifying his theory. Indeed, if the Eddington expedition’s eclipse experiment had not resulted in the bending of the starlight passing near the sun, Einstein’s theory of relativity would indeed have been proven false.

I think of the widespread belief, today, that there’s consensus on some overarching scientific theory of global warming. There, of course, though is nothing scientific about it at all. It’s more like a rolling improv show in which any new oddity is somehow woven into the central narrative in some patchwork method that keeps the thrust of the idea moving forward. Now, none of this is to pass judgment on the truth or untruth of the claims as seen from a God’s-eye point of view. But whatever God does or doesn’t know, it’s not science because there are never any conditions for falsification. Would sudden worldwide temperature drops disprove the overall warming of the climate? No, just as overall temperature rises doesn’t prove it. In the absence of some testable conditions, the result of which, as suggested by the internal logic of the theory, could disprove that theory, it doesn’t meet the conditions of being science.

Now, of course, one can make a case for a public policy that takes seriously the prospect of global warming on the basis of work that actually is scientific. Such work, though, is much more focused and modest: dealing with the melt rate of glaciers, the reading of sediment samples from fjords, and hypotheses on the impact of sun spot activity. None of that, though, makes the widespread, vernacular, media-driven idea of a theory of global warming into something scientific.

As alluded to above, though, taking falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science does not privilege scientific knowledge nor ennoble the role of the scientist in society. In fact, quite the contrary! The principle of falsifiability requires that anything that is scientific is always open to being tested. Now, at a certain point, in Popper’s phrasing, a theory may be taken to have proved its mettle – an endless, exhaustive testing is not the point. But, at no time is any scientific proposition considered beyond testing. The testing test is that anyone can find out how to do it; can actually do it; and, if doing it, will reliably reproduce the expected results. So, anyone, any time, can test. Furthermore, new tests can always be devised. And, in the case of the eventual emergence of competing theories and propositions, a return to determined testing is required. For Popper, commitment to any proposition that does not meet these conditions of falsifiability constitutes nothing more than mere dogma.

Therefore, those who have dismissed Popper as promoting a positivist science based upon the presumption of an ultimate truth which can only be accessed by an ordained cult of master experts called scientists have completely missed his point. Indeed, in reading Popper it is completely dumbfounding how anyone could possibly read him this way.

First, the falsifiability requirement means that any scientific proposition, no matter how reliable, how thoroughly tested, is always in some long view only tentative: it’s merely waiting to be disproved. Think again of Einstein’s dethroning of Newton: for generation after generation, people were born, lived and died believing that Newton had solved the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. (Kant said that Newton had gazed into the mind of God. And, as Alexander Pope put it: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.”)  There has never been a more successful scientific theory. But it too, eventually, fell. It’s not that Popper does, or needs to, conclude on the existence of absolute truth. The point is that that’s not the domain of science. Even if the historical unfolding of our scientific process did hit upon some absolute, unassailable truth, God may know it, but we never would. Any time we treated any such proposition as the absolute truth, it would no longer be a scientific proposition. In this very real sense, just as Popper dismissed the historicists (see, told you) for their delusion that there could ever be an end to history, so, for Popper, there can never be an end to science – as long of course as it remains science per se: i.e. based upon falsifiability.

So, to present Popper as some obsolete old positivist bent on the eventual transparency of an absolute Truth is a complete misrepresentation. Plus, there’s an additional point that is too easily overlooked in all of this that needs to be emphasized. In the principle of falsifiability, Popper is also rejecting any notion of science as an esoteric practice, rooted in any kind of cabalistic knowledge. Indeed, part of the reason for his rejection of induction as scientific method (besides its simple unworkability) is the degree to which it lends itself to the filtering of initiates based upon approved or disapproved experience. The principle of falsifiability, with its basic testing requirement, leaves the practice of science open to anyone. No special initiation or recondite rites are required. Any person of reasonable intelligence with a critical faculty and capable of following a logical process, is able to participate. Furthermore, that very same person, with those same qualities, not only is capable of participating in science, but is capable of assessing and judging science. There is nothing here that suggests the promotion of scientists as some secular priesthood.

Rather, Popper quite explicitly argues that as knowledge – rooted in critical and rational thought – scientific knowledge is no different than any other. Yes, its discovery has methodological qualities that make it distinctly science, but as a form of reason it’s merely an extension of reason and knowledge in the general society. The open society, for Popper, is the society in which knowledge and critical reason learn from science, not one in which science is reduced to a dogma and scientists elevated to a priesthood administering that dogma. Far from making a fetish of science and scientists, Popper’s logic of scientific discovery and his philosophy of science bring science into the domain of public scrutiny – makes it accessible, in practice and judgment, to the democratic citizen.

Popper democratizes science – a proposition that would seem pretty odd to the postmodernist types who have taken such comfort in consigning him to the dustbin of history. I won’t even make the slightest gesture toward explaining how that state of affairs came about. However, to wrap up this rather lengthy posting, I will come back to the matters of relevance for the concerns of MIFO and organizational governance and communications.

First of all, what does this suggest for the science of MIFO? At the most obvious level, a passion for constant measurement and ranking does not in itself constitute science. Indeed, it’s in some danger of lapsing precisely into inductive thinking. Evidence is always important, but whether it’s being used scientifically, where it’s leading to universally legitimate statements (however tentative all such statement must inevitably be), is quite another matter. Induction all too easily lends itself to the endless accumulation of evidence to support a tautology in the absence of falsifiability. If we’re only measuring for indicators that support our presupposed expectations we are ill-prepared for the surprises that life has a way of delivering. All such measurements, if only based upon inductive presumptions, can all too easily turn into a house of collapsing cards.

On the more positive side, though, the most dynamic expressions of MIFO put a great emphasis on the experimentalist and nimble nature of the new arrangements. In Poppers version of scientific method one finds a vision of knowledge and theory-building that lends itself (dovetails?) quite elegantly to these notions and practices of organizational governance. In Popper’s version of scientific discovery, MIFO finds both a tentative confirmation that indeed it may be moving in just the right direction at the experimentalist level, while also offering a way to rethink the inductionist tendencies that, if left unexamined, could undermine not only the new organizational governance, but the popular legitimacy of 21st century democracy itself.

Finally, that brings us to the other two points raised above for MIFO and its heavy emphasis on organizational communication, with its distinctly dialogical dimensions, which can be conveniently considered together for my purposes, here. The opportunity provided by the emerging organizational communication to elude the kind of technocratic policymaking, public and private, so romanticized in the mid-20th century, through an expansive and dynamic integration of stakeholders, including the public itself, into value-laden policy decisions – such as those related to agreeing on acceptable risk and the allocation of scarce resources – is not only based upon the opening up of that archipelago of dialogic spaces. It is equally based upon the capacity of their participants to exercise the critical reason that transforms such spaces into the enabling fora of democratic citizenship and organizational dynamism. As we’ve already seen, contrary to widespread misrepresentation, Popper’s falsifiable and testable version of science tames the authoritarian impulse. The scientists are given their rightful place as the custodians of a special form of knowledge discovery, but in the very process are also integrated into a democratizing process by which science is made transparent and accountable to the general public.

This democratization inherent in Popper’s notion of science, though, isn’t restricted to accessibility of scientific knowledge. It extends to the contours of a model for critical reason that breathes life into the very notion of the open society: a society in which decisions are made upon evidence and arguments, that invite debate and diverse contribution, and which eschew esoteric shamanistic and cabalistic tendencies in favour of rational processes open for all to examine, assess, criticize and challenge. And, as we’ve seen, the same principles apply to the open enterprise of commercial MIFO. At the core of Popper’s project for a rational science is the promise of democratic citizenship and dynamic organizational governance. Certainly Popper’s logic of scientific knowledge is no panacea for all potential obstacles posed in society or organization. However, the contribution that his legacy offers far exceeds the appalling neglect and misinformed dismissal that has characterized his treatment by trendy relativists over recent decades.

I had the opportunity recently to watch the great 1965 film King Rat. I don’t think I’d seen it since I was a kid. I was extraordinarily impressed with it as a piece of filmmaking. The filmmakers never lost touch of the larger scope of the story’s context. Whenever it came down to a specific interaction or conversation, there was always a sense that we were focusing on some detail of the larger canvass. Having taught film studies in a former life, I could go on at some length on its cinematic merits, but for purposes here I also thought it was worth mentioning: it provides an intriguing illustration for those interested in matters of governance and organizational dynamics.

What the story is really about, more than any of the individual characters who populate the landscape, is the emergence of an alternate form of organization amid a highly regimented environment due to an environmental crisis. The crisis is the brutal conditions of the prisoner of war camp where the story takes place. A superficial glance might suggest that the plot centres on a criminal organization run in the camp by George Segal’s character. At the most superficial level, that’s true – but it really misses the point. This POW camp is one of extraordinary privation and suffering. When one thinks of the standard POW camp film, while there invariably will be the rebels and eccentrics, for the most part military discipline and respect for rank remains firmly in place.

In this film, the harshness of the situation causes such discipline and respect for rank to dramatically deteriorate. Out of this organizational dysfunction a mere corporal emerges as a leader within an alternate organization. This character possesses the qualities and skills to both survive under these harsh conditions and to take others along with him. In a section of the camp restricted to commissioned officers, the lowest ranking among them, we discover, has officers vastly his superior in rank, working for him in his organization.

It would be a mistake to see this as just another film about criminals and criminality. I think the fact that it’s set in the most regimented of possible environments, where everyone has a place in the hierarchy of rank, is important. While, among a society of relative equals, it might not be surprising that some would take advantage of others, in an organizational setting defined by rank, discipline and authority the point seems to be vividly illustrated. No matter how regimented and hierarchical an organization might be, given the appropriate crisis conditions, the opportunity for alternate forms of organization, governance and leadership will emerge. The only question is how they are best addressed.

It would be easy to dismiss the group centred around Segal’s character as merely self-serving opportunists; there’s no doubt that once the outside world restores conditions of conventional authority and hierarchy, the alternate organization and leadership quickly dissipates. The final moment of the film – indeed its last line of dialogue – seems to imply, however, that under those extraordinary conditions of crisis the tentacles of beneficial influence extending from that alternate organization may have served many more than might have been obvious when viewed at a glance of the surface.

In any event, it struck me that the film provided plenty to ponder for those interested in questions of governance and leadership under conditions requiring organizational self-renewal and self-revival.

The greatest and most common mistake in considerations of power, throughout the social sciences and humanities – very much including organizational communications theory – is the rather lackadaisical casting of “power” as basically a synonym in conceptual cahoots with the likes of oppression, domination, authority, control, etc. Yet, none of these has absolutely anything at all to do with the definition of “power.” Indubitably, all these forces require power, but no more so than brushing your teeth, shopping for shoes or reading this blog. The term “power” is used in this synonymic way to sneak certain ontological assumptions through the back door: e.g. that the dominated, oppressed, exploited, etc., are somehow, powerless, passive and innocent. This view serves ideological purposes associated to historicist analysis, justifying particular kinds of attitudes and actions. However, such use thoroughly obscures the actual richness and complexity of what’s going on in any real life organizational or social setting. Only by clearing up these erroneous notions will it be possible to have an ideology-free discussion of power and lay the basis for materialist revision of organization communications and theory.

The problem with dictionaries is that, eventually, they give in. If enough people use a term or phase in a certain way, long enough, regardless of how incorrectly, eventually the dictionary will list that usage. After all, the dictionary’s job is to record usage, not police it. Conceptual clarity and intellectual rigor have that job. Alas, it’s a big job. However, at least the dictionary does establish a hierarchy of meaning, so that we can see what the historically original and etymologically core sense of a term was. From there, observing the various derivations and misapplications can provide amusement. A truly keen philologist can even dig into the various ideologies and self-serving agendas that inspired those derivations and misapplications. We’ve already gone as far down that road as this revision will concern itself. This line of discussion has only been opened as a preface to inviting the reader to go and open an English dictionary – any one you want. Open it to the word “power” and read the primary meaning: the first one listed; the historically original and etymologically core sense of the word.

There’s no dispute or controversy on this point among those not responsible for the mental gymnastics of making everything fit their prefabricated ideology. Power refers to the ability to do or to act. It dates back to the 13th century, when it was derived from the same root as the French pouvoir, which we all know translates into English as “to be able to.” Je peux = I can. Not oppression, or domination, or any of these other ridiculously self-serving associations. This isn’t to deny that there are cultural, economic, political, and other, forces at work on a social or even organizational level and that such forces can only be activated by power, but analytically starting with these forces, as reifications of power, obscures the fundamental questions about where that power came from, how it came to be enacted in this way, what other possibilities could and do exist and, rather importantly, what other manifestations of power are relevant to, or present in, the situation. It seems like rather a lot to overlook.

The bottom line is straightforward enough: all the dramatic, glamorous and history-making manifestations of power that so many scholars in all fields prefer to emphasize all have their roots in the common, individual human actor. To put it as simply and concisely as possible: power is generated through the exercise of human vitality. Power is the doing of something and there is no power unless individual, specific, humans do something. Anything! It’s all the manifestation of power in its basic form. This basic, individual power may be generated simply for the passing moment or regular maintenance: blowing up a party balloon or brushing one’s teeth. Or, indeed, power may be generated with long term purpose: building a house, growing a garden. Reading this, or any other, blog is no less a manifestation of power than punching somebody or wrestling someone to the ground. Starting a company, working at a job for that company, joining the union, working overtime, taking a long lunch break, organizing the company Christmas party, working hard, finding ways not to work hard, flirting with one of the machine operators. Notwithstanding their differences in intent, values or impact, all share the core common denominator of being some kind or other manifestation of power. This is how it all begins.

So, to restate the matter, at a slightly more abstract level: In each case, each individual employs her or his vitality, or life force, in the practical context of some endeavour. The raw expression of vitality is manifested as force or intensity. The inherent plasticity of this force or intensity lends it to innumerable actions. The application of conscious or unconscious focus and direction to that force or intensity, guiding it into specific tasks, constitutes it as power. Obviously there’s nothing inherent in this idea that entails exercising one’s power over the will or interests of someone else. It is the sheer expression of sentient life at work. For our discussion, here, we’ll restrict ourselves to the human and the specifically social and organizational domains of human experience. In that context, there’s no denying the fact that one of the consequences of the creation of power is that some people do indeed use their vitality, their life force, to control, oppress or dominate others. We’ll have to look at exactly how this happens, but we’ll far better understand the role of power in these processes and the massive and extensive ways in which power always far exceeds the limits of these processes, once we appreciate the apolitical, indeed organic, roots of all power.

Not all the cases of wrongly used synonyms for power are analyzed to exactly the same conclusion, but let’s take probably the most common and maybe the most loaded of the erroneous synonyms: domination. Domination I’ll take to mean explicitly the successful imposition of one’s will over some other(s): for the dominant one to get over the other, on top; to wrestle the other down, actually or metaphorically. This requires power to realize will. At the same time, for you to exercise domination over me, you must be able to overcome my resistance: the action of my power applied against you. This could be due to your greater strength, but it also could be due to my surrender and or acquiescence, in which case my power is practically activated in the interest of my own submission – perhaps fearing, rightly or wrongly, the price I will pay, in one way or other, for resisting your imposition of power. It should be emphasized here that power does not mean exclusively physical power. Mental, intellectual and emotional power can evade, resist, deceive, subvert or tame the greatest physical strength if it is powerful enough. This, still at the level of individuals, should be straightforward. Now, though, we look at the escalation of these forces into social dynamics.

What is true between individuals is also true of collectives of such individuals, organized into cliques, gangs, clans, churches, armies, corporations, nations, etc. The more power that one group can muster over another the more likely will be its dominance. Obviously the collective with the largest number of individuals, assuming a rough equality of personal strength among all participants, would be at an advantage in this regard. However, as the “critical” theorists should remember from their Marx, and his discussion of labour power embodied in capital, power can also be embedded into material and immaterial objects, and such objects can be used as instruments for the overpowering of others: clubs (of either kind), firearms, missiles, computers, complex contingency strategies and propaganda are all examples of the vitality of some individuals embodied as objects, whose embodied power can be practically activated in the interest of overpowering others. All these kind of considerations must be calculated into the equation when we endeavour to determine who has the greatest scope of power at their disposal.

So, if certain states, corporations or other groups, as militaries, bureaucracies or more subtly power-embodied institutions, exercise power over “the masses” – the undifferentiated collective of individuals – this is due in part to the power they wield, not only in the number of coordinated individuals they employ, but in the fantastic range of other individuals’ power they practically activate in the embodied forms of material and immaterial objects as systems, symbols and mechanisms. My point here is merely that all forms of domination are ultimately rooted in the acutely felt and thoroughly tangible vitality of real individuals’ life forces. At ascending macro-levels the objects that embody past power investments can create forces that vastly supersede the original power invested. For instance, for all the vast investments of individual human power in the creation of nuclear weapons – in which the scientific-technical actual weapons development is only the tip of the iceberg – is completely dwarfed by the power of destruction now unleashed on the world by that initial investment of human vitality, vast as it was in its own right.

However, bear in mind, wielding such power is not the same thing as possessing or generating such power. Wielding power is about authority. It’s not power that gives individuals, offices or institutions strength beyond that of personal capacities, but the authority to wield the power of others. That authority may come from coercion, election, ownership, delegation, trust, loyalty, etc.  Disparities, therefore, of control or influence, while they can be expressions of individual differences, within organizational settings are almost always expressions of authority differentials. No doubt, any person or persons who wanted to wield collective or embedded power would have to wield whatever power and authority they already had at their disposal to achieve the requisite level and degree of authority. The two, though, are separate and rigorous analysis requires the maintaining in our minds of that distinction.

In all this the rule remains: the force of all power is always ultimately traced back to the investment by individuals – knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly – of their vital life force. (The fact that that investment may be coercively compelled by the force of objects created by prior power investments, in no way changes the proposition.) All power, always, is put into effect by the practical activation of individuals’ vitality.

This, though, we need to keep in mind is only one side of the equation. To be alive and in any way functional is to possess vitality and exert power. To be a mentally functioning human being is to dispose power. This is simply an inescapable reality. The exercise of our power can be in utter disregard to the existence of others. It also can be directed toward the dominance of others. And, certainly, it can be directed as resistance against those whom would aspire to exert their power in dominance over us. However, there is no guarantee that we will use our power to resist the power of others. Perhaps we are convinced of the rightness of others’ domination of us. Perhaps we merely desire the domination of another. One thinks, for instance, of the groundbreaking studies of Eric Fromm on the German workers of the Weimar Republic. In any such event, our submission and acquiescence involves us in activating our inescapable disposing of our power in the interest of our submission. The acts of surrender, acquiescence and submission are not less the manifestation of power than are those of conquest, control or dominance. There is no abdication of power in human life – except in death. And, obviously, even suicide and self-destructive choices are still the result of exercised power.

This opens the door to the far more complex and difficult question of desire, which is just as fundamental as power, and invariably intertwines with it in all human endeavours. It is really quite extraordinary how organizational communications textbooks without fail conduct some dutiful discussion of power – however inaccurately – but virtually never even whisper a hint about desire. And yet, while its power that makes organizations go, its desire that gives power its purpose.  Power is the engine of organization, but desire is the fuel that feeds that engine. This is, then, an immensely important topic, but not one I’ll be able to address here. However, before going any further, a few caveats need to be added.

First, while a thorough discussion of all the contingencies and vicissitudes of submission as power is beyond the limits of the current undertaking, I should mention that in the real world I suspect that the reality of actual fragmented subjectivities suggests probably a complex interaction with domination. That is to say, even one who actually desires the dominance of another, probably, in a variety of subtle ways, also acts to deceive, evade or subvert the dominance of the other. Power is not a single package. Even if the majority of one’s power is activated in the interest of submission, that does not rule out discrete acts directed toward other purposes. Likewise, anyone who directs her power to the dominance of another surely simultaneously invites defiance and resistance, however unconsciously. As complex as human motives are, so equally diffuse, inevitably, will be the exercise of real world power.

Secondly, for those who bemoan these ideas as just an abstract version of the old blaming the victim trope, I plead guilty – and don’t sweat your maudlin political correctness in the least. My whole point is that victims, at various levels of conscious-to-unconsciousness, do choose to varied degrees and in varied ways their own victimization. If such critics’ primary objection is ontological, it will have to be taken up at another time and place. If, however, their objection is motivated by concerns for social change, I will mention that this model of power, insofar as it posits an always available, ever potential, untapped resource of resistance, it suggests a far more promising proposition for social change than a theoretical precept that assumes that victims are totally dominated – fully activating their power in the interest of resistance, but still overpowered by the force of the other. Their “victim” is just an object of bleeding heart hand wringing. My “victim” remains an active subject always implicated in the practical realization of his or her own power.

A third, and final, caveat: tyrants, societal or interpersonal, should not be taking heart in these observations. Nothing here legitimizes or apologizes for the exertion of domination over others. No doubt the agents of undesired domination, at whatever level, may comfort themselves with self-satisfied assurance of their subordinates’ desire of their conditions. But haven’t tyrants always bolstered themselves with their ideas about the others’ weakness, childishness, primitiveness, etc. In the end, it is either true or it is not. Nothing written here changes the existing material power relations within those real world affairs.

I will conclude, then, with some explicit sketching of what this means for organizational communications and theory. Organization is power. To organize anything is a form of acting and to act is a manifestation of power. So to suggest organizations without power is senseless. Incidentally, exactly the same is true of communication. Communicating is a kind of action; any acting is a form of power. Any consideration of organizations and organizational communication is drenched in the inescapable reality of power. It is all about power. Yet, none of this in even the slightest way implies the existence of dominance, oppression, exploitation or the control of one or some over others. And, in whatever organizational context in which such states do exist, they do not even come close to exhausting all the power that thrives and makes full, real and vital the organization in question.

Some might go with me as far as saying, well resistance is a kind of counter-power so perhaps you have a point. No, that’s not my point. First, resistance is not counter-power. It would only be counter-power if power were synonymous with dominance, which it is not. Resistance is power, but, again, it is still caught up in the mental fog imposed on so much of organizational theory by “critical” theory and postmodernism. Dominance is power, resistance is power, management is power, accounting is power, report writing is power, a departmental meeting is power, filing is power, typing is power, stocking shelves is power – none of them by means of some mental gymnastics that sees some devious expression of meaning or control – such as in the ludicrous and widely propagated notion of concertive control. They’re power simply because they are actions generated by the conscious focus of human vitality on a purpose. There is no organization in the absence of such power.

What I find oddly amusing is that very often the very same people who perpetuate this reified and distorted notion of power will also be the same people who celebrate Gidden’s theory of structuration. And yet, Gidden’s theory operates on very much the same premise as what I’m proposing. Structures, like organizations, do not exist in some trans-human dimension of reality. They exist because those involved with them, day after day, continue to do all the things, follow all the processes, abide by all the routines – all the management, accounting, report writing, meeting, filing, typing, etc., etc. – that make them possible. If the responsible people stopped doing those things overnight the organization would effectively cease to exist. There might be some empty buildings, abandoned fleets, inventories gathering dust, legal documents declaring rights and responsibilities – but none of that constitutes an organization. Without the power of human action, it’s merely concepts and things. Is a ghost town still a town? If so, why do we feel the need to qualify the character of the town?

Now, as Giddens would want to remind us, don’t make the mistake, therefore, of thinking that organizations are not real, are not, in fact, powerful. Powerful is exactly what they are. All those processes and routines create vast interlocking systems of mutual support and dependence that contribute to deeply seated imperatives for action. From self-interest to psychological comfort and beyond, people have plenty of reason, each day, to carry out the processes and maintain the routines that keep organizations running – keeps them brimming with human power. This is the great irony about any organization: they are simultaneously ingrained ways of thinking and acting that almost defy conscious evaluation while also being fragile expressions of human action requiring renewed commitment daily. The processes sustain the structure as the structure induces the processes. But none of it happens unless humans are exercising their power to act in the simultaneous creation of both.

Social things happen because people do those things. Some time that doing is only immediately relevant, sometimes it becomes imbedded in systems or machines that continue to have great influence long after those people are gone. However, though, the manifestations of human power – which is the force of human action – is articulated and activated within an organization, there is always an inventory of power input that can be broken down – deconstructed in the non-obfuscating sense of the word – to account for all the elements that make up any organization. This includes its purposeful operation as well as all the dynamics that go on within: competition over resources, struggles over control, cooperative problem solving, negotiation of informal responsibilities, shelves being stocked, and so on.

And, yet, as central as each discrete expression of power is in the composition of any organization, as has already been alluded to, that is not the whole story. For, in addition to recognizing the function of power in breathing life into organization, we have to be aware that that’s only half the story. At the end of the day, power follows desire. Any organizational theory, any understanding of the dynamics of organizational communication, is rudderless without desire. Gratifications and routines are not inherently compelling; they compel through their appeal to desire. To really understand power, in all its many dimensions, within any and all organizations, the draw and function of desire has to be tackled.

But for that you’ll have to buy the book.

One of the most salient manifestations of the Multi-directional Iterative Feedback Organizations (MIFO), in recent years, has been in the practice of Open Method of Coordination (OMC). OMC has been a development of the public sector.

The complications involved in maintaining the accountability and transparency essential to ensure democratic standards, occasioned by the growth of horizontal public governance – with its partnerships, outsourcing and special operating agencies – has resulted in a wide range of instruments and orientations. The orientations I have in mind tend to be on the soft skills side. They’re those related to communications and trust-building: persuasion, negotiation and team work among the more salient. The instruments I have in mind tend to be on the hard skills side with an emphasis on assessing, counting and ranking. Performance measures, benchmarking, results-based outcome parameters are among the most popular. In all of this there is a prevailing commitment, at least in principle, to broader organizational values such as innovation, continuous quality improvement, best practices and organizational learning.

However, since the first great wave of emphasis on such instruments and orientations, arising from the new public management (NPM) agenda of the 80s and 90s – with its emphases on client services and separation of policy-making and policy practice – there has been a distinctly discrete application of these new administrative tools. This is not to say that public managers didn’t aspire to utilize the optimum combination of such instruments and orientations to achieve their aims. Such combinations, though, were perceived as mutually supporting, at most – and on occasion as not much more than sequential. In any event, what was usually lacking was a vision of these instruments and orientations as mere parts of a whole: elements in a comprehensive, integrated totality. Yes, the result for each could be assessed discretely, but the cost of such an analysis (breaking down or taking apart) as opposed to the promise of a synthesis (bringing together into a new whole) was a bifurcation (more accurately, a multifurcation) of the actual opportunity presented by the aggregate of these new tools.

In the 90s, though, we find the initial refocusing of this emphasis: the first rudimentary steps toward grasping the potential here for a kind of quantum leap in governance thinking. In the face of vexing governmental and social challenges that proved chronically unreceptive to either traditional bureaucracy-driven, rules-based solutions or the NPM approaches, the demand for creative, even risky, innovation opened the way to experimentation that revealed the latent potential in a more synthetic approach. The various instruments, orientations and values referenced above, when properly integrated, provided an approach to governance so distinct that it is not mere hyperbole to suggest it may well be regarded as the next generation of the new public governance.

Today, widely codified as either experimentalist governance or “open method of coordination” (OMC), this new synthetic approach has been broadly implemented within the evolving institutions of the European Union. Though they didn’t strictly invent it (for an example of how OMC saved the Chicago public school system from institutional disintegration in the 90s, see Charles Sabel “A Quiet Revolution of Democratic Governance”), but they have certainly taken it on as the pioneering initiative that it is – though not one without controversy.

In a nutshell, and my apologies if I oversimplify, but, the gist of it is that a central body, after extensive comparative research, establishes realistic, basic, outcome goals which are then set up for the subordinate units under its aegis – for instance, a school board and its individual schools in the Sabel article, mentioned above. But then each individual unit is free to pursue those goals by whatever means its members/stakeholders see fit. The central body may continue to play a role in providing advice or even training where necessary, but, in the absence of any threat of harm to members or clients, the units are provided complete latitude in finding their own way toward the designated goals. In the process, then, each individual unit becomes a separate laboratory of organizational innovation.

They will have specific responsibilities, which will include a thorough documentation of what they did, how and why they did it, along with measurements of their performance and results. At the end of a pre-stipulated period, I believe it was three years in the case of the Chicago schools, the central body comes back to the front of the stage: it gathers, audits, evaluates and, most importantly, makes available through a user-friendly medium, the totality of all the information and experience produced from this broad scale series of experiments. The fruition of this process is an ambitious collaborative benchmarking in which all participating units are able to review and assess what worked, where, how, and under what conditions.

As one of the underlying motives for this approach is the understanding that distinct local circumstances mitigate the effectiveness of centrally imposed systems, there is no movement from here to a centrally enforced regime based on the resulting best practices. Rather, each individual unit studies the most successful practices for ideas of how they can improve their own practice. If their circumstances permit a wholesale implementation, all for the best, but, if not, there is still the opportunity to discern what elements of others’ practices – identified as best or not – that they might retrofit to their own local needs. With the learning benefits absorbed, the process resumes. Each individual unit tries to apply lessons learned to improve their performance over the subsequent period, until the assessment and learning phase starts again. And so on.

The result of this is a constantly recurring learning loop, providing ever renewed best practices, contributing to an institutional culture of continuous quality improvement and permanent organizational learning. Take note, as well, that what we have here is an entirely new synthesis of governance’s well established instruments, orientations and values into an elegant model that actually transcends (not merely creates some hybridification of) the age-old debate over the relative merits of centralization (with its claims to superior coordination and universality) and those of decentralization (with its claims to superior access to local knowledge and context sensitivity). In fact of the matter, this approach so thoroughly and rigorously transcends the limits of the centralist-decentralist debate that I want to call this emerging organizational dimension “transcentralism”: an organizational space made possible by OMC in particular and MIFO in general that exists beyond the zero-sum game of the old centralist-decentralist organization space – now counting its days toward obsolescence.

Warranting additional note, this process often has the virtue of engendering dialogical spaces for public participation. For instance, in the Chicago schools example, the local management experiments entailed enhanced participation of the communities in the operation and guidance of their local school. There have been similar results in the rapidly expanded implementation of OMC within the European Union. To repeat, though, this expansion hasn’t arisen without some controversy. There are those who suggest that it gives too much power to unelected public officials and reduces democratic control of public policy and governance, to mention just one example relevant to our context. I’ve found the arguments against such criticism far more convincing, but we’ll have occasion to revisit these issues over the life of this blog.

In the event that someone, who hadn’t a clue as to what the thematic title of this blog refers, happened to stumble by, I wouldn’t want to be an inhospitable host, so I thought best to start with a posting that provided some kind of overview of the topic. MIFO is a term that I’ve coined to try and capture the material reality of emerging organizational practices. The acronym stands for Multi-directional Iterative Feedback Organizations. It may seem a bit of a mouthful, but it’s a lot easier to verbally wield than the concept to which it refers. MIFO are organizations that entail collaborative and experimental processes, based upon fluid, contingent negotiation of the terms of those processes, which are embedded in larger, repeated, trial and error invention, across a host of boundaries – inter- and intra-organizational.

MIFO is a term that tries to capture worldwide developments in organizational dynamics that are more horizontal than vertical; more networked and kinetic; more nuanced and nimble; more communications and solidarity-based; and at their best don’t merely restate or re-jig, but actually transcend the old centralist/decentralist debate (with a new reality I call “transcentralism”). MIFO open opportunities for new kinds of dialogue, breathing life into deliberative spaces. They create the opportunity for better crisis-response, problem solving and innovation through dynamic self-renewal. They build upon and take advantage of our increasing appreciation of the benefits in networks and complex adaptive systems. At their best, they employ a rich range of practices – all too often haphazardly or narrow-mindedly misapplied and misunderstood – such as benchmarking, performance measurement, organizational learning, flexible contracts and continuous error reduction, in a synergetic whole that dramatically re-invents organizational potential.

Though these developments have been most famously noted in certain sectors of commercial corporate endeavours – particularly the computer, automobile and aeronautic industries – MIFO are in fact slowly remaking the entire face of human organizational life. In the public sector, the long rollback of direct state delivered services, in the face of the fiscal crisis of the welfare state, has created new urgency for MIFO-style reinvention, largely pursued under the code word of “governance.” Possibly, our last hope for maintaining some kind of social provision of services lies in a successful implementation of the MIFO agenda. An abject failure of the MIFO agenda could well propel us back into the conditions of an 19th or early 20th century minimalist state, where social needs must be serviced by the churches and benevolent societies – whose original failure to address the perceived requirements of growing democratic, equitable, liberal societies, occasioned the rise of the welfare state in the first place. Likewise in civil society, NGOs increasingly look in the direction of MIFO organizational principles as they need to partner, perform at cost-recovery levels, and innovate. Labour organizations that have grown to recognize how traditional union practices have become archaic in the new context look to new networked forms of coordination and delivery of service to members. Even protesters, over the last decade, have increasingly applied the MIFO lessons of transcentalism from Seattle to Tehran.

Einstein observed that once we had invented the means for splitting the atom, it could never be uninvented; the knowledge, once gained, was never going away. We might say much the same thing about MIFO. One shouldn’t be Panglossian about the situation. Their contribution to social disruption and dislocation continues unabated. Career security has been made a shambles; economic security has become more tenuous for many, many people; those with authority, prestige or wealth invested in the older models must resist them; well entrenched cultures, psychologies and routines stand obstinately in their way; questions persist as to how such organizations accommodate a democratic ethos. And yet, for all their challenges and setbacks, the many faces of the MIFO march on. In the end, I suppose, the question becomes, if MIFO continue to provide for better products and services, enable more adaptive and innovative institutions, create more satisfying work, coordinate more effective actions, and provide better solutions to previously intractable problems, at some point does resistance become simply an unsustainable competitive disadvantage in life?

In any event, these are the issues that intrigue me and they are the theme for this blog. I hope readers find it of interest, informative and maybe at times a little entertaining.