On Tue, 18 Nov 1997 18:44:55 -0500 (EST),
>I've just been flicking quickly through some of November's messages and
>the question that's been bugging me for the last five years, is still
>bugging me. Can you honestly tell me that you all enjoy working in
>organisations and wouldn't swap the experience?
I think the issue is not that I work in an organisation, because I work
for myself (I got totally bugged working in a large government
bureaucracy). For me, issues arise from the fact that I am both
functionally and spiritually inter-dependant with others. The
"organisation" is not meaningful on its own - we have finite means, but
infinite ways of organising ourselves - few of which we actually try.
Meaning is invested in the patterned ways of relating between ourselves
and from those relationships, we derive our identity. In this sense to be
organised is to be.
>Organisations are a manifestation of society. We pride ourselves on
>attaining a classless
>society, and yet within organisations we recreate those same class
>structures, "them and us".
This is a self-defeating argument. If organisations are a manifestation of
society, and within those organisations people are class-ified and
stratified, then we do not have a classless society. BTW who is "we" and
which "society" are we talking about here, either way, the point remains,
bureaucracy (functional stratification) seems to dominate.
...snip...
>My question is why? Why do we have this compulsion to create
>organisations?
We are not compelled, the enemy is within. To be different from what I
currently am is to lose my identity. To attempt the transformation of my
own identity is like lifting a scab off a wound. I simply replace it with
another scab - new thoughts, feelings and behaviours become patterned into
organised modes of expression... a new organisation is born. The question
is whether the new scab is any better than the old scab.
neil
Kelly Consulting Pty Ltd Development Strategies
PO Box 5769 Tel 617 3844 8077
West End Q. 4101 Fax 617 3255 0360
AUSTRALIA <nkelly@mailbox.uq.edu.au>
--"Neil Kelly" <nkelly@mailbox.uq.edu.au>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>