
The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1972) - hargup
http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
======
quanticle
This brings to mind something I said a while ago about Holocracy. Holocracy
doesn't get rid of your managers. Rather it just prevents you from knowing who
your manager is. Instead of having clearly defined priorities (e.g. I need to
handle requests from person A before I handle requests from person B), you
have to do a subtle political calculation, evaluating the relative social
capital of person A and person B before choosing who to listen to or follow.
And if you guess wrong, then you end up marginalized and fired, often without
knowing precisely why.

~~~
golemotron
The challenge for society going forward is to recognize this and to not
reflexively try to remove all authority and hierarchy.

OSS does well with the BDFL model (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictator_for_life)
). The people who practice it best use their authority to set tone and agenda
and then step back to let people own their participation. They step back in
only when they have to.

In universities today the idea of a "safe space" is in vogue. We might
recognize that safe spaces require some sort of protection. It can come from
campus police, in online communities it can come from people who are charged
with that role, and in companies it can come from managers and executives.

Not all overt power is abused.

~~~
dalke
There are two aspects to the BDFL model: 1) a BD, 2) FL. There are several OSS
projects with a BD, but who is not FL. For example, I co-founded the Biopython
project, which has rotated through several leaders.

Jo Freeman encourages several principles, one of which is:

> Rotation of tasks among individuals. Responsibilities which are held too
> long by one person, formally or informally, come to be seen as that person's
> "property" and are not easily relinquished or controlled by the group.
> Conversely, if tasks are rotated too frequently the individual does not have
> time to learn her job well and acquire the sense of satisfaction of doing a
> good job.

This is an argument against a BD _FL_. Note that even in Python development,
van Rossum does not always have the final say. Mark Shannon was the "BDFL-
Delegate" for the type hints PEP 484.

The main point of the essay is not that overt power is inherently abuse, but
rather describes methods to limit abuse of both overt and implicit power.
Emphasis mine in the following:

> If the movement is to grow beyond these elementary stages of development, it
> will have to disabuse itself of some of its prejudices about organization
> and structure. _There is nothing inherently bad about either of these._ They
> can be and often are misused, but to reject them out of hand because they
> are misused is to deny ourselves the necessary tools to further development.

~~~
golemotron
The point is that we can decide not to fix what isn't broken. Rotation of
leadership is a great solution if you have a problem that calls for it. If you
don't, then it's not worth it.

------
mwfunk
Whenever someone wistfully posts about how great it would be if their > 100
(heck, even > 10) employee company had a flat structure like Valve, I can't
help but cringe a little. If you don't have an explicit organizational
structure, how is it not inevitable (if not present from the outset) that you
end up with an implicit organizational structure, one that's even more based
on socializing, old boy networks, etc.

IMO whenever someone speaks longingly for such a thing, they imagine a
meritocracy in which they are somehow more valued/important/influential than
they are at their current job. I don't think anyone would advocate a structure
in which they themselves would be less valued than they are currently, that's
for sure.

It's hard not to see calls for flat orgs as being much more than an
unconscious expression of professional narcissism- "I know better than my
stupid manager, if only I could do things exactly how I wanted to, on my own
schedule, everyone would be better off!". I've got to think that that
statement might be true in some cases, but for every valid case there are 100
or 1000 people who are thinking the exact same thing simply because they
overvalue the things that they care about, undervalue the things that other
people care about, and in general don't know what they don't know. Even dumber
would be those who assume that they would end up at or near the top of the
magical, Utopian meritocracy that would emerge from such an arrangement.

~~~
coldtea
> _I don 't think anyone would advocate a structure in which they themselves
> would be less valued than they are currently, that's for sure._

Except if they genuinely believe in equality and hate being above/managing
other people, but rather be equal part of a team, even if that means losing
their managing privileges...

It's not like there are no people who didn't dislike management and wanted
(and some did) get back to plain programmer.

~~~
aninhumer
Except you probably can give up management if you really want to, but you'll
probably have to take a pay cut. Which is kind of the OP's point.

It's not that you want to be less valued as a manager, it's that you want to
be more valued as a programmer.

~~~
coldtea
> _Except you probably can give up management if you really want to, but you
> 'll probably have to take a pay cut. Which is kind of the OP's point._

And I've seen people do that too, why the disbelief?

Turn down more highly paid managerial positions, because they'd rather not be
leading people.

~~~
aninhumer
Sure, but if they're fully satisfied by that then they're not the ones
advocating structural change, so they're not counterexamples to the OP's
claim.

(Arguably changing an individual's role is still restructuring, but I think
the OP was talking about more comprehensive restructuring suggestions.)

------
wpietri
The Wikipedia article on this (famous 1972) article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessness)

Short version: if you try to avoid the problems of existing organizations by
not having an explicit power structure, you instead end up with an implicit
power structure. That is not a problem at small scales when the organization
is for discussion rather than for getting things done. But it has many subtle
problems.

At the bottom, there's a nice list of things to experiment with as
organizations search for useful explicit power structures: delegation,
responsibility, distribution of authority, rotation of power, allocation of
work, diffusion of information, and equal access to resources.

Since this article is about women's movement issues from 40+ years ago, it can
seem irrelevant. But given how non-traditional organizational models are of
the moment (e.g., open source projects, holocracy, Occupy, BLM, twitter
organizing), I think it's useful material for anybody who's shaping an
organization.

------
futuravenir
I'm in the middle of reading "Reinventing Organisations" and it's absolutely
wonderful. It examines a handful of organisations that are doing it
differently (including Holocracy) and takes notes about how their techniques
compare and what they might have in common.

It's basically the blueprints towards building the next most efficient
organisation. I highly recommend it.
[http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/](http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/)

~~~
dalke
Does it cover the cooperative model, like the Mondragon Corporation, or the
Wobbly shop? I can't find a table of contents, and DDG finds no reference to
Mongragon or Wobbly on the web site. I figure that a book which doesn't
discuss those two alternative forms of business organization is hiding
something. For examples, hiding who owns and controls the capital, or hiding
that it's not really a new model but has been around for a century.

Personally, I take the warning at
[https://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC&pg=PA131&dq=%...](https://books.google.com/books?id=IKZVKMPEQCEC&pg=PA131&dq=%22wobbly+shop%22&hl=sv&sa=X&ei=Y6U-VY7fNoyusAHq8IHwAw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22wobbly%20shop%22&f=false)
to heart:

> Industrial democracy: By analogy with political or state democracy, a
> description of democratic practices as applied to workplaces. There are two
> major ways of thinking about this concept. The first involved some liberal
> conception of representative structures that allow workers to have influence
> over decision making, responsibility and authority. The extent of such
> influence can vary substantially, from an employer's 'suggestion scheme'
> through workplace methods such as 'team-working', up to the various forms of
> consultation and co-determination exemplified by Kalmar, Semco, or the John
> Lewis Partnership and the Quality of Working Life movement. Whilst these
> examples provide illustrations of alternative forms of organizing, they all
> largely rely on the idea of empowerment as something which management does
> to workers. In other words, management and owners still have the ultimate
> sanction, and could withdraw democratic privileges if they wished.

> The more radical way of thinking about industrial democracy would be in
> terms of worker self-management. In this case a cooperative or an employee
> share ownership plan (ESOP) would mean that all those working for an
> organization would have a direct share in its profits and losses. As a
> result, they would have a clear interest in participating in democratic
> mechanisms to elect or deselect those who coordinate organizational
> activities; to dictate strategy; to take profits or reinvest, and so on (see
> Mondragon; Suma). Both forms of industrial democracy have been credited with
> increasing the motivation and commitment of workers, as well as increasing
> productivity and decreasing labour turnover. Whilst advocates of the liberal
> version might suggest that those were good things to achieve because they
> can increase shareholder or owner value, for the radicals all these would be
> secondary to the idea that labour might escape alienation in a Marxist
> sense. In other words, liberal ideas about job satisfaction are pale
> reflections of the conception of work as a form of human expression (see
> Fourier).

~~~
futuravenir
I'm about a third of the way through the book. It's tough to say whether it
covers 'the cooperative model' because so far, it approaches aspects of
business quite individually.

Here's the table of contents:
[https://i.imgur.com/OS9XGhN.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/OS9XGhN.jpg)

~~~
dalke
Thank you! It's hard to tell from the list if it covers coop models. It would
be in Board/Ownership, starting on page 251.

One clue earlier might be if the workers can fire the CEO and decide CEO pay.

~~~
futuravenir
Well, in the context of traditional orgs, the board can fire the CEO. In this
book, he speaks about making certain that the CEO & board members are all on
board with the 'teal organisation' mentality.

In other words, I don't believe it addresses the legal structure as much as
the organisational one. Unfortunately, I have to bring it back to the library
today...but I'll be buying my own copy that I can cover in highlighter. It's
really interesting for anyone interested in organisational structure and
offers a lot of insights into potential workarounds to problems you might run
into.

------
larakerns
Here's a rebuttal to the original piece, The Tyranny of Tyranny:
[https://libcom.org/library/tyranny-of-tyranny-cathy-
levine](https://libcom.org/library/tyranny-of-tyranny-cathy-levine)

~~~
PavlovsCat
> The omnipresent problem which Joreen confronts, that of elites, does not
> find solution in the formation of structures.

"Structure" covers a wide spectrum though, from formal and rigid, to unwritten
or very simple and mutual rules. I think despotic and alienating structures
being bad doesn't make structure as such any more bad than, say, a bad book
would make books in general bad.

I personally like the concept "order within liberty" a lot:

> _You don’t know what order with freedom means! You only know what revolt
> against oppression is! You don’t know that the rod, discipline, violence,
> the state and government can only be sustained because of you and because of
> your lack of socially creative powers that develop order within liberty!_

by Gustav Landauer, who also said/wrote:

> _One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass; but those are idle
> talkers and credulous idolaters of words who regard the state as such a
> thing or as a fetish that one can smash in order to destroy it. The state is
> a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of
> behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving
> differently toward one another._

And I think the article you linked kind of agrees with that, even:

> While, ultimately, a massive force of women (and some men) will be necessary
> to smash the power of the state, a mass movement itself does not a
> revolution make. If we hope to create a society free of mate supremacy, when
> we overthrow capitalism and build international socialism, we had better
> start working on it right away, because some of our very best anti-
> capitalist friends are going to give us the hardest time. We must be
> developing a visible women's culture, within which women can define and
> express themselves apart from patriarchal standards, and which will meet the
> needs of women where patriarchy has failed.

Whether you call it culture or structure or organization, everybody seems in
agreement that just wandering off and doing your own thing _all the time_ will
not yield great results, though one might argue about details. Is that
impression wrong?

------
batz
If you want to see staff withdraw, check out, or blow up at random, remove the
consistency they use to self-assess their performance. A lot of tech companies
are too young to understand that a meritocracy is more about leadership than
trivia.

Flat organizations (as distinct from BDFLs) reward bullies and manipulators,
consistently with the "star system" in the article, while punishing pro-social
people who align based on principles and reasoned consent to rules.

------
igravious
Two years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7409611)
| 121 comments

I remember it coming up :)

I used to volunteer in an anarchist-led bookshop. "The Tyranny of
Structurelessness" was one of the texts I was referred to upon starting in
order to help me understand that one ought to spend a bit of time thinking
about hierarchies (or the lack thereof) and their consequences.

This is my take on the topic given some reflection. Like money, hierarchies
are not intrinsically bad. Like money, hierarchies are a tool for getting shit
done. Money can be abused. Why? Because greed. Because the will to power. We
know what money is good for, it is an abstraction that facilitates exchange
and trade. What are hierarchies good for? Coordinated action via a chain of
command. Hierarchies can be abused. Same reasons. Because greed. Because the
will to power.

I've been thinking recently about a certain type of hierarchy where the
stratification is highly ordered. Think military hierarchies. Each layer
reports only to the one above. There is a strict chain of command. Orders must
be followed without question. Because this special type of hierarchy emerges
again and again (think about how we structure a very complex text even) I
thought it must have a name. I couldn't find one so I'm suggesting
_isomerarchy_. All from ancient Greek: we all know that iso means same, like
isomorphic, isobar, and so on; meros is less familiar and means part or
division, the study of parts and parthood is mereology[1]; finally, archon[2]
means ruler from which we get monarch (literally rule by the one). Hence,
isomerarchy. Funnily enough, both isomer[3] and merarch[4] are both existing
concepts which rely on exactly this etymology.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mereology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mereology)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomer)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merarches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merarches)

------
ilostmykeys
Basically, if you give yourself freedom to act on your impulses then your
impulses will own you. Managers are supposed to be the rational decision
makers. That cannot be true of every manager. In my opinion, if each person
acted rationally we would not need any managers and we would only have to deal
with one tyranny: rationality.

------
arximboldi
This article is interesting, but too often misinterpreted.

People most cite it as an argument for why you need hierarchies in your
organization. However, I don't think the article gets to claim such thing.
Instead, it claims that one should not let structure be implicit, because then
it degenerates in tyranny.

People are too used to think that structure == hierarchy that we assume that
the corollary is that hierarchy is needed to avoid tyranny. David Graeber in
his "Utopia of Rules" [1] makes a good counterargument: if your goal is to
avoid tyranny it's little difference to have it implicit or explicit. In the
later case, you are just giving some moral justification for it -- you
legitimize it, in the most literal sense of the word. What you need is, if you
want to avoid tyranny, a resilient and explicit flat structure, with
mechanisms in place to identify and reject emergent tyrannies.

I understand, though, why we are becoming disillusioned about the word "flat"
in the business world. Most businesses that try to go "flat" still have a
vertical ownership structure. What "flat" actually means in that context is:
"you have to figure out how to make money for me, but I'm not going to tell
you how!" This creates a lot of anxiety, because at the same time that workers
are told to feel empowered and take responsibility, everybody spends so much
energy in figuring out what are the invisible walls of the cell, and what
their patrons actually want from them. I think it takes a lot of alienation to
really thrive in such environment.

That does not mean that flat is impossible in the business world, in my view,
you just need an explicit flat structure that begins with your ownership
model. A company that I know of that has such structure is Igalia [2] (discl:
I don't work with them but have acquaintances there)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules)
[2] [http://igalia.com/](http://igalia.com/)

------
todayiamme
> Since the movement at large is just as Unstructured as most of its
> constituent groups, it is similarly susceptible to indirect influence. But
> the phenomenon manifests itself differently. On a local level most groups
> can operate autonomously; but the only groups that can organize a national
> activity are nationally organized groups. Thus, it is often the Structured
> feminist organizations that provide national direction for feminist
> activities, and this direction is determined by the priorities of those
> organizations.

A very interesting aspect of structureless entities is that it is very hard to
form counter-narratives to them. If you look back at successful revolutions,
then their rhetoric revolves around specific events that show everyone why
something is unreasonable. For the American revolution, it was the Boston
Massacre - a specific instance in time that the revolutionaries could use as
evidence of injustice. The dismissal of Jacques Necker, a finance minister in
Louis XVI's cabinet, led to the storming of the Bastille and in turn the
French revolution. Change often revolves around a commonly shared notion of
injustice.

Without an explicit power structure, it is hard to create the common ground
necessary to ferment change. How can you find a specific experience that
everyone can relate to when everyone's experience of the group is inherently
different? How can you find that one thing within the structure that frames
the overall problem, when there is no commonly agreed one to pin down? People
will spend more time arguing about what the structure might be than finding
practical solutions to problems.

This effect seems to be so powerful and unseen that it is becoming a
fashionable method for preserving the status quo. It's popping up everywhere
from businesses to nation states. My favourite example is the work of Putin's
advisor Vladislav Surkov, a man who was once the publisher of avant-garde
poetry and a patron of deconstructionist art. He has worked very hard to
deconstruct war for Putin and create a structureless society. At its heart his
doctrine is a heightened form of that same structurelessness this article
discusses. Except its done at the national scale.

Inside Surkov's Russia, the Kremlin maintains control by ensuring that there
is no explicit power structure - just shifting cliques in perpetual conflict
with other cliques;

"""

[..] The brilliance of this new type of authoritarianism is that instead of
simply oppressing opposition, as had been the case with 20th-century strains,
it climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them
absurd.

One moment Surkov would fund civic forums and human-rights NGOs, the next he
would quietly support nationalist movements that accuse the NGOs of being
tools of the West. With a flourish he sponsored lavish arts festivals for the
most provocative modern artists in Moscow, then supported Orthodox
fundamentalists, dressed all in black and carrying crosses, who in turn
attacked the modern-art exhibitions.

The Kremlin’s idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any
independent movements develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like
an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for
dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hid...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/hidden-
author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/)

"""

~~~
jacobolus
This is hardly a new idea.

I recommend the classic sociology paper _Robust Action and the Rise of the
Medici, 1400–1434_ ,
[http://home.uchicago.edu/~jpadgett/papers/published/robust.p...](http://home.uchicago.edu/~jpadgett/papers/published/robust.pdf)

------
exolymph
Should switch the link to the author's own website:
[http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm](http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm)

Especially since she specifically mentions that this piece has been widely
republished without her permission.

~~~
dang
Ok, we changed to that from
[http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/tyrstruct.html](http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/tyrstruct.html).

~~~
exolymph
thank you dang!

------
yarrel
The tyranny of "The Tyranny of Structurelessness".

~~~
sixo
You left out the predicate, you know, the part that makes this sentence
worthwhile.

~~~
dempseye
I assume the implicit subject-predicate structure here is something like: "The
Tyranny of Structurelessness" itself exercises a kind of tyranny.

It would be interesting if the person you were replying to would expand on
that idea.

------
Avshalom
Literally every problem mentioned is equally endemic to highly structured
organizations. "Office Politics" did not enter common use from all of our
experience with anarchist company offices.

