Towards New Commons in a Bureaucratic Society

* Chapter/ article: Networks and Commons: Bureaucracy, Collegiality and Organizational Morphogenesis in the Struggles to Shape Collective Responsibility in New Sharing Institutions. By Emmanuel Lazega. Chapter 10 of the book: Morphogenesis and Human Flourishing, Social Morphogenesis, ed. by Margaret Archer. Springer, 2017

URL = https://www.springer.com/la/book/9783319494685

Description

Towards New Commons in a Bureaucratized Society:

"What kind of combination of this bureaucracy -the default organizational form- and forms of collegiality emerging with new commons can we expect? What is the nature of the interactions between bureaucracy and collegiality when solving particular problems of collective action and collective responsibility. How do these organizational forms mix and interact?"

Excerpt

Emmanuel Lazega:

"The bottom-up challenges to the legitimacy of top-down collective responsibility imposed by this bureaucratic parametrization to shape the institutionalization of the new commons will take the form of morphogenetic struggles to control this digitalization. Since there may not be any optimal stabilization of this struggle, society may also become a morphognenic system with an ongoing creation of new models. Digital parametrization of the new commons is part of contemporary morphogenetic institutional changes. This parametrization started long ago with widespread and gamified intrusiveness of platforms providing network profiles into individual privacy,7 as well as the capacity offered to citizens to all become creators of online collectives. This digitalization may also undermine bottom-up institutional entrepreneurship. Indeed, in many online network services provided globally, individuals today can look at their list of contacts but not at the structure of their own network profile, even less at the profiles of their friends, and cannot reconstitute “communities” and organized social movements that are created by the hypergraph and concatenation of these profiles. They lack the capacity to zoom in and out of social networks that are, at any one point in time, the carriers of organized collegial action. Only ownership and control of the platform provide that capacity today, without any real checks on this new power.

Social digitalization as bureaucratic control of future new collegial commons is carried out as parametrization of the organization of collegial local communities and sharing networks. Such new commons may not be purely local but locality matters, even as geolocal grounding for these platforms. It makes it easier for ordinary citizens to resist when bureaucrats, party leaders, creditors, inspectors, etc. show up. The generic commons are for the neighbours’ association, people sharing the same actual physical land resources. Locality creates a centre of gravity for them and for the sharing of resources or space that helps with their sustainability.8 This social digitalization is based on monitoring, accounting for and making sense of exchanges, but also on shaping relational infrastructures (providing such actors with more centrality, such niches with more resources).

The morphogenetic process of institutionalization of new kinds of commons will use digital platforms and as such it may be a silent, invisible process of parametrization of these commons with bureaucratic algorithms as much as (if not much more than) an open political process of democratic (representative or participative) rulemaking. Social digitalization can be a new way of subjecting, homogenizing and taxing the diverse commons unobtrusively. As in the duality of collegiality, it may increase the rate of creation of new commons, but also end up subordinating them to bureaucratic control. The tools for creating the commons could also be the sources for their streamlining. Social digitalization will increase the rythm of creation of commons that existed before the emergence of these platforms. Research needs to flesh out the set of choices that these digital platforms make for citizens when they use them to build their new commons –i.e. choices that they are not aware of and that prestructure the unexpected ways in which these commons will be used to enforce collective responsibility.

If the meeting between bureaucracy and collegiality is now shaped by social digitalization bureaucratizing the commons in an organizational and morphogenetic process, platforms will organize civil society by parametrizing collective responsibility, within or without the framework of the/civil law. The social order that platforms thus develop will rest in part on online virtual social networks of interactions and organize the live offline relations that coordinate/emerge through these platforms. Since it creates the online context for live offline relations and exchanges, the multilevel architecture and the ownership and control of the platform itself deserve close sociological inquiry. This is even highly compatible with mass bureaucratized markets plus the military pathway to the bleak prospects outlined above. Such a digital structure can take over at the macro level and manage millions of collegial pockets that will try to protect themselves from both the environmental crunch and the violence of the military bureaucracy.

Creating institutions for the new local commons will be a dynamic multilevel process (Lazega 2013, 2014b) mobilizing networks, relational infrastructures, social processes and many other ingredients characterizing collegiality, including its vicious cycles (of patronage, clientelism and corruption). But the emergence of this institution will be parametrized by bureaucracy just as the bishop sets limits and conditions to his priests’ participation and cooptation. It sheds light on the widening ‘democratic deficit’ that characterizes modern societies. This institutionalization raises the more general issue of the relationship between the democratic process and lobbying in pluto-technocratic bureaucracies. Tracing this regulatory process leads back to the determinants and proliferation of ‘anormative regulation’ (Archer 2016 volume; Al-Amoudi 2014; Al-Amoudi and Latsis 2014).

Behind any commons, there are communities mixing formal and informal rules, contractual and non market relationships (Coriat 2015) thanks to the relational dimension of social processes. In a world in which profit extraction and capital accumulation are violent, bureaucratization of the local commons can be seen as both a way to prevent local communities from closing off in oppositional solidarities, privatizing their resources in their collegial pockets; and a way to spread new digital and bureaucratic controls that will monitor, manage, tax and sanction, using collective responsibility, in potentially predatory ways these local communities. If elites with private armies prefer their current closure and the military pathway, then mechanisms must be put in place to challenge them and force them to equate survival and the interests of the many, not only the collegial and oligarchic few. Despots, even enlightened ones who are helped by big data platforms invading people’s privacy, cannot achieve on their own the protection of a heritage that can be transmitted and without which the next generations will not have a decent life. Hopefully, democracy can be saved by new New Deals and new constitutions. It can be trumped by plutocracy and captured institutions. It can be destroyed by fascism; but it can be also weakened by parametrization of the new digitalized commons, i.e. transformed into an ersatz of democracy, using collegiality as a tool for management, just like the Catholic church, but with likely more brutal and forced forms of collective responsibility.

If morphogenetic processes only may be able to bring about the changes that are needed for collective survival, then mechanisms should be put in place that, based on better understanding of new forms of co-constitution of bureaucracy and collegiality, challenge closed elites and force them to equate survival and the interests of the many, not only the collegial and oligarchic few. By using for example dynamics of multilevel networks to identify forms of virtuous and vicious organizational morphogenesis, sociologists may increase their chances of making their discipline relevant again for institutional change and innovation. Indeed knowledge of organizational morphogenesis may help actors define the collegial social discipline that they find legitimate for their commons so as not to exhaust the social capital that produces an alternative to the bureaucratic and military path, and eventually understand how to create a protected heritage to transfer to future generations. A neostructural approach is a useful part of the intellectual adventure of contemporary social sciences if it helps identify in morphogenetic mechanisms what must change in the transition for the earth to be livable by future generations." (https://www.springer.com/la/book/9783319494685)