Self-Managed Model of Organisation

The Self-Managed Model of Organisation [SMMO]: an emergent property within-mode of organisation and generative of a new-mode of organisation.

The future of the business organisation is a narrow concept that misleads us to view organisation in an ideological and instrumental way. That verstehen is symptomatic of the development of human social relations and capability.

Organisation is more usefully understood as a deeper human attribute. Indeed, I would argue humans do not exist outside an organisation. The exclusion of most aspects of human life from ‘organisation theory’ is both poor science and is better classified as ideology.

The ‘business organisation’ is understood as an already agreed narrow concept relating various categories of social relations which are both legal and contested. Thus, within the human domain of existence such entities are not stable. SMMO proposes that is the nature of organisation. It further proposes that is the case because all human activity is organisation bound and that totality is itself bound by wider dynamics loosely described as evolution.

SMMO further offers the observation that all modes of production capitalist and pre-capitalist, no post capitalist mode yet exists, are fluid and dynamic and as such socially constructed. As a socially constructed entity it is self-managed in the loose sense. There is therefore a wide landscape to observe in considering the future human organisation.  

Nevertheless, we can still address the question of the future of the business organisation. I would address it within that wider setting of a deeper human purpose.

Business Organisation:

SMMO is a concept to transform business organisations. It reflects ‘human organisation’ as a conscious shared social setting that enables multiple task and outcome objectives to be achieved. It maximises innovation and is grounded in total commitment to self-actualising members. It is a conscious and shared arrangement designed and measured by maximising shared rewards. The SMMO follows the footsteps of the commodity form of organisation that has evolved since the Roman empire, but especially in the human 17th-20th centuries.

“Autonomous organisations promote diversity and are not aiming to directly determine a universalist form of being”.

[Martin Arboleda, Planetary Mine, 2020]

In political, political economy and sociological theory the ‘commodity organisation’ is a power concept promoting a single focus on financial metrics and all other objectives are by products and generally unmeasured. Property is the basis of power in the commodity organisation form, it tends to be labelled ‘capital’. Wages are the reverse of property and depict the ‘ownership’ of beings by dominant ‘property owners’. Non-capital is the status of most humans and they succeed by performing ‘labour’ under the control of the owners of capital.  

The concept of property has been a powerful concept in human history and since classical Greco/Roman times has been a codified system of social relations supporting imperial expansion of a dominant social relations, namely capital and capitalism. No era or preceding mode of organisation has achieved the change in productive output that this mode of organisation has achieved. Therefore, it has been the most successful historical human organisational form.

Dislocation and Dysfunction:

The commodity form of organisation has promoted war, social instability, relative poverty, and environmental chaos. It promotes privilege and reinforces all forms on inequity and chauvinism. It is a system of power and narrow social strengths. The instability is part of the dynamic of change and ‘growth’. Growth is a linear concept presented as the ultimate purpose of human existence. Progressively that system has succeeded materially but conceded power socially. Increasingly complex layers of power vested in what is referred to as ‘the state’ require constant refreshment of the dominant partial view to maintain a hegemonic status.

As a hegemonic system it spreads propaganda as a substitute for objective analysis. There is a permanent debate about truth and rights. SMMO thinking suggests that each organisation form succeeds in relative terms in contexts that are both historic and contingent. Thus, in different periods human society achieves levels of success with aspects of life but not all. The success and the failings are a measure of sustainability and of learnings to create the next version of the commodity form.

The Arboleda quote, reflects the broad bourgeois leftist critique of the commodity organisation by highlighting the cultural diversity of autonomous movements/ ‘organisations’ in resistance to and as alternative for the commodity organisation. SMMO argues that such positions contribute to the commodity organisation and are alternatives within-mode.

The SMMO proposes that the end game of social relations is simply what is agreed. Thus, there is an existential and phenomenological development which is inevitable. It is not an abstract theory of right or wrong. The purpose of organisation is to produce and reproduce human social artefacts. What we produce is what we produce.

Organisation is how the human succeeds and the SMMO thesis is that we make that a conscious artefact and displace the ideological commodity form organisation. Thus, the arrival of the SMMO is a measure of the success and the exhaustion of the commodity form of organisation. The SMMO could not exist without the evolutionary passage of the commodity form.

SMMO is therefore a challenge to existing social relations and patterns of organisation. It is not solely a challenge to power but to all actors. SMMO proposes conscious and therefore responsible actors collaborating to pursue ends that are shared.

Like the preceding modes of social organisation, any existing organisational form it is rooted organically. It is not a programmatic and statist position. SMMO corresponds to an historic developmental state, reflecting more competent and complete social infrastructure. The state is a commodity form organisation that cannot achieve the sustainability required for balanced and organic social development. The SMMO requires a growing unifying view of life and a rejection of the ‘dominant partial view’.

State concepts are grounded in minority interests and hegemonic apparatus dressed in policy. The digital world is achieving integration and unity that nation states cannot achieve. The basis for inclusion or exclusion in the digital organisation is transactional. In nation states it is based on prejudice and privilege.

SMMO is an organic and systems concept that succeeds via conscious participation of its participants. No SMMO can be complete as the mission is nascent and contains the imperfection of the previous social relations and the limits of information in given time space. Human existence is evolution and like the rest of the earth is constantly changing. There is opportunity in the flaws of the past. Marx highlighted how the mode of production is a dynamic process creating and exhausting unevenness in forces and relations of social organisation.

SMMO is an existentialist view as no end point exists for the earth upon which and within which we exist as beings. As Humans we can construct ‘purpose / teleology’ and like synaptic resonance, fire conscious experiences to create learnings and ‘new’ behaviours.

Those human purpose constructs exist within the vacuum of a total earth system that is incomplete. The earth is an equation in motion; and we are both a result and an input, as catalyst, within that equation.

SMMO offers a diversity landscape for organisational arrangements supporting the diversity of evolution. The commodity form organisation adopts a homogenisation approach to all social relations and therefore all beings. The bourgeois thesis is to standardise and to hegemonize using a dominant partial view of life. The commodity is the dominant category, it is the core of the property and wage relation.

Unique identities and constancy of innovation are hallmarks of SMMO, and they are counterweights to the commodity form organisation.

Care Sector Approach:

The Self-Managed Model of Care [SMMC] is an autonomous organisational form in the care sector. Its purpose is as agreed by its constituents. There is no ideal type only the actually existing form derived from specific social relations and forces.

Markets are organic and not inherently commodity exchanges. Markets are pre- capitalist. As such all human business organisation is attached to markets including what is regarded as ‘public sector’ / non-traded sectors. The label public sector is loaded as logically all human activity is public, and there is no private activity in a market, as that is a non-sequitur.

The commodity and the commodity exchange are attributes of the specifically capitalist mode of production. Markets can function without commodities. Markets are therefore not commodity organisation forms, but they are subordinate to commodity organisations and the mechanics of exchange.

SMMC can promote innovation and generating value for better human life.

The commodity economy was an innovation determined by specific attributes deriving from the Roman Empire’s physical control of land / property and using systems of codification (law/ rules) with monopoly of power at hand.

A self-managing model of care as SMMC is, recognises that wage labour has limited value in the care sector. Care is a unique activity, and as documented by Engels and feminists, is core to the existence, health and reproduction of the physical human and the social relations within which we exist.

Care is best arranged around real needs at the point of need by the service user. A carer is best suited to clients by being close in physical and social relations terms. All system-based resources should be designed upwards from that 'coupling' to develop truly community-based healthcare.

Today’s advanced economies are based on commodity systems of health and care which arrange services as producer designed factories and manage via monopoly and bureaucracy.  Care is based on incarceration and support for worst case conditions / co-morbidity manifestations. Each individual human needs to 'prove' entitlement to care. these dysfunctionalities offer opportunities for innovation.

At present bourgeois theory sees that as a funding issue. SMMC suggests it is a human issue and that a redefinition of care and the value of care are required.

Nation & Species

Modern capitalism is the ‘democratic’ luxuriant and technocratic form of that early Roman genesis.

The socialisation of relations required to expand and maintain the mode of production increases the challenge to refresh and renew. Each iteration of renewal achieving greater social dominance, by power of physical force or ‘civilised law’.

SMMO [SMMC] is an expression of that refresh and renewal. It builds on the commodity system but promotes bespoke and personal systems allowing autonomy for producers and consumers liberating markets from corrupt monopolies and bureaucracy.

The Planetary Mine and the concept of ‘political economy of territoriality’ seem to offer very insightful observations allowing deeper understanding of the capitalist mode of production and in particular the positioning of globalisation as a long term planetary dynamic and not a system created by nations. As such nations are the servant of the planetary system.

It is worth noting the earth as a single physical system already existed before humans. Thus, we can easily allow the depiction of human history within a planetary dynamic.

Part of Arboleda’s arguments relate to the manifestation of local communities of resistance that are non-conventional but trans-global in social and spatial terms. He offers the ‘allyu’ as a non-universalising community that can thwart the homogenising trends of capitalism.

It is a good insight but also misplaced as the dynamic is within the mode of production. Capital socialises labour and increases the globalised intensity. Yes, the ‘globe’ existed but the accumulation dynamic is human. The human reacts to patterns and takes control of them. Thus, humans dominate an expanding landscape.

We can adopt a bespoke and tailored approach but that becomes the homogeneity. Only if the ‘allyu’ stays at the gate and does not interact, can the universal / expansionist dynamic be held in suspension. Arboleda wants a universal ‘local’ not seeing that in itself is homogenising, as in commodification. He is also ignoring that the outcome of an ‘autonomous’ organisation that does promotes a counterweight to the universalist thesis of ‘being’ and organisation, has arrived in direct consequence of the commodity form of organisation. Historical continuity demands an explanation of the historical transition. The explanation is the commodity form produces a new more socialised form, within-mode.

The universal tendency must be followed and the experience of its negative results which as a dialectic will lead us to renew ‘allyu’ but not maintain the old one. It will be ‘allyu 2.0’. Marx explained the movement of history as such a process. Further he directly observed that it was capital that socialised labour. Capital ‘massified’ labour as an abstract category. As Polanyi argued in the mid- 1940’s the categories of land, labour and capital were fictions. Polanyi is directing us to recognise that nothing in economics is natural except that it is socially constructed. Obviously, economics and economists, like politicians, are real. Polanyi's lesson is that all can be changed to suit the dominant view.

The point here is that all things change. The change is not a conspiracy but a reflection of the dynamics of history. SMMO offers humans a new way to approach social development and what we loosely call progress. It also injects the conscious recognition that all parties to the organisation are better off voluntarily engaging and their rewards should be such that they wish to maintain that organisation.