Organizational Frames
Description
Joe Brewer:
"Social movements throughout history have achieved lasting success by altering institutional structures and cultural norms to reflect their core values and beliefs. Their achievements can be seen in
(1) the emergence of new social practices like interracial marriage or the honoring of indigenous traditions;
(2) adoption and enforcement of policy frameworks like the Bill of Rights or the Endangered Species Act; and — in some circumstances —
(3) as novel organizational forms that alter the institutional landscape like the new hybrid for-profit/non-profit legal charter for the benefit corporation or the crowdsourced archive of information known as Wikipedia." (http://empathysurplus.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/governance-structures-for-social-movements1.pdf)
Example
The General Assembly Organizational Frame
Joe Brewer:
"here are a variety of organizational frames that can be deployed to build capacity in grassroots movements. The most central one used by Occupy was the general assembly — an open public forum for deliberation where all decisions are made by consensus and new agenda items can be introduced by any participant in the process.
The organizational frame at play here is the General Assembly Frame which can be thought of as a container that represents the physical space where people gather to discuss matters of importance to the community.
Strengths of the General Assembly Frame include:
• All participants have equal power. There is no centralized decision-making body or hierarchical authority.
• Agenda items are ranked by their overall relevance and importance to the entire group. No “special interest” or “elite power” can bias the agenda toward their private ends.
• All decisions represent a consensus view of the majority present. Thus they embody the core tenant of democratic practice where everyone has equal voice and there is no tyranny of the minority.
For a group that organized itself in opposition to elite power, this structure makes quite a lot of sense. Yet it also contains within it a major limitation that warrants special note — the consensus process is notorious for producing sub-optimal outcomes. While it does lead to decisions that reflect the majority view, many compromises tend to arise along the way that may be overly incremental and moderate. In circumstances where the emphasis is on minor improvements to an existing set of issues, this process works rather well. But in times where radical or revolutionary disruptions are necessary, it is often ineffective at promoting innovative paradigm-shifting changes to existing systems.
This tendency can be seen in risk-averse thinking across the group, a lack of creativity as “groupthink” dominates the dialogue, or a muddled “everything but the kitchen sink” set of solutions that stand little chance of producing workable solutions to the real-world problems—with all their nuanced complexity—that the group came together to address.
Furthermore, the consensus process tends to be very time consuming and slow to progress. During times when agility and rapid response are essential for success, it becomes a highly undesirable way to achieve collective outcomes." (http://empathysurplus.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/governance-structures-for-social-movements1.pdf)
The Activation Network Organizational Frame
Joe Brewer:
'Another important structure used by Occupy was the Swarm where a leaderless movement emerged spontaneously in multiple locations all at once. The key organizational frame behind this behavior is the Activation Network Frame — where multiple nodes of a network are constantly monitoring for threats and each is able to engage in rapid response to changes in the local environment. Examples of the activation network include the hive behavior of social insects and the immune response of a complex multi-cellular organism.
Social insects (bees, wasps, termites, etc.) constantly monitor the chemical trails left by individual members of their hive and respond quickly to the release of stress markers in the proximity of a new predator or some other disruption to their normal routines. Multi-cellular organisms have special cells within their bodies—one example being the lymphocytes in the blood of mammals that attack viruses and tumors before they are able to spread—that float throughout the body and respond locally when a harmful contagion is discovered.
The key features of an activation network are decentralization and localized rapid engagement. The Occupy Movement spread quickly as local community members organized themselves into encampments and protest actions. There were no visible leaders who could be targeted across the movement and specific actions reflected the local character of each group and the concerns they rallied around." (http://empathysurplus.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/governance-structures-for-social-movements1.pdf)
- Learn more at
http://www.chaoticripple.com/2011/occupy-wallstreet-swarm-behavior-and-self-organized-criticality/