How Organizations Spread around the Globe
Historians’ attempts at mapping the development of societies have generally been limited to the consideration of states, religions, and economic processes, charting the spread of religions and the expansion of centres of economic growth and trade routes. The structure of historical atlases seems to take its bearings from functional systems – with a very clear preference for the social sub-systems of politics, religion, and the economy. But what would a historical world atlas of organizations look like?
My guess would be that the atlas would not need to cover the time before the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and even then a few maps would suffice. The section covering the nineteenth century would surely be substantially bigger than the others, and would show, for example, the spread of the universities, based on Humboldt’s model, to North America, or the distribution of certain methods of industrial production. For the twentieth century, the maps would presumably show the explosive spread of the structural patterns of organizations.
Over the centuries, more and more social areas became structured by the organization as the dominant form. Whereas originally this was limited to religion and the state, today areas such as the economy, education, science, sport, and tourism are all determined for the most part by the form of the organization. The concepts of the ‘organizational revolution’, ‘emergence of managerialism’, and ‘organization society’ are attempts to capture the success of the organization as a social structure.
The usual explanation for this success story points to the superiority of organizations, and especially of businesses, when it comes to providing a structure for collective action. Both the classical economists’ view of the business as an institution and the political economy of Marxism agree to a remarkable extent on this point. Both explanatory models take organizations as the ultimate solution to the problem of how most effectively and efficiently to structure labour. From this perspective, the global victory of the organization as a structuring device is simply down to its superiority as a system of purposive rationality.
But this explanation, in terms of purposive rationality, leaves many questions unanswered. How do we explain the spread of organizations in countries, regions, or sectors which do not seem to have required them? Why is it that states in the so-called Global South have developed complex networks of public and private administrations despite the fact that they still mainly have subsistence economies? Why do we see the increasing bureaucratization of, for example, religious activities, even though in this area, too, requirements are fundamentally the same as they ever were?
The roots of the organization are to be found in early Christianity. The first signs of the formation of organizations in the modern sense appeared when the early Christian church began to recruit its members independently of descriptive criteria such as family membership, membership of a particular class, or ethnic background. With the separation of politics and the legal system from religion – and even more importantly with their separation from the general social context – in late-seventeenth-century England, organizations began to form in these areas as well. From then on, political and legal organizations were increasingly able to decide on their membership autonomously. With the beginning of industrialization, wage labour became a specific social role that did not involve any expectations external to the role itself. Work was no longer predominantly located in the family; rather, the members of a family pursued their work independently of one another and in different places.
Initially, organizations mainly spread through the setting up of new branches. Again, the prototype for this procedure is to be found in religious organizations. By establishing sub-units, churches and monasteries not only increased their religious influence but also became an important factor in the expansion of particular forms of organization. To begin with, this process was limited to Europe; later, with the ‘discovery’ of new continents, the form of the organization spread to America, Asia, and Africa. The process of setting up branches can also be found in the case of the trading companies that were founded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which already exhibited many of the traits of modern organizations. Because the largest profits could be made in long-distance trade, trading companies built local branches in America, Asia, and Africa that were often protected by the military. Whereas a merchant of fourteenth- or fifteenth-century Venice may have sent some trustworthy relative abroad, now large trading companies with numerous branches emerged and spread the principle of the organization: the Hudson Bay Company, the Royal African Company, the British East India Company, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie. The expansion of this model of structuring can be imagined as akin to biological cell division. The emerging branches function like cells that have separated from the main cell without, however, losing contact with it. The end of the era of colonialism also spelled the end of the centrality of the branching model, though it did not disappear altogether.
Following the end of the colonial period, ‘contagion’ played an increasingly important role. This phenomenon arises out of the fact that organizations are created because they are the entities that are best placed to communicate with other organizations. The emergence of public administrations in developing countries is an example of such contagion. It is an often overlooked fact that the idea of a public administration was a novelty, especially in African countries, but also in Asian ones. In many of these states, the rudiments of independent administrations formed only during the last years of colonial rule. There is strong evidence that developing countries created this type of public administration because it was the only type of entity with which Western organizations could communicate. In the case of companies, increasingly global value chains meant that certain services had to be provided by suppliers. Again, there is strong evidence that these suppliers set themselves up as companies not only because this was the most efficient solution with regard to value added but also because their client companies found it easiest to communicate with other companies. The explosive proliferation of NGOs in the twentieth century can be explained at least in part in terms of the phenomenon of contagion. Ultimately, organizations in both the Global North and the Global South find it difficult to communicate with amorphous entities such as ‘the target group of women living in poverty’ or the ‘landless people’s movement’ – not to mention ‘civil society’ itself. The emergence of NGOs is therefore often the result of existing organizations ‘demanding’ the creation of associations that are able to act.
The phenomenon of contagion should not be seen as a passive process in which an ‘organizational virus’ attacks a social structure. As forms of labour, methods of coordination, and forms of structuring, they are not tiny organisms infecting a ‘social body’. The process of social contagion always takes place through active appropriation, a willingness to get infected, so to speak. An idea, form of labour, or technology, as Bronisław K. Malinowski pointed out, must always be picked up by some actor. Without that happening, an idea can never spread within a social system.
