Some definitions are short and sweet. Humans for example: a parasitic representation of an agglomeration of parasites (replace parasitic // parasites with symbiotic // symbiotes if you’ve had more coffee than I have today). But while humans might be organizations according to the above definition, it doesn’t answer the question of what an organization is (and crucially, what it isn’t – a definition is as much a picture of what something is not as a picture of what something is). So let’s start with what an organization is not, I think it will be easier for us to agree. A single person is not an organization. But are the cells and bacteria in a human body organized? Do they have methods for communication, an administration, and functions? It appears they do. But the cells and gut bacteria are organized with respect to each other, not with respect to the person. So the individual person is not an organization, even if the person contains organizations (you don’t administer or set goals for your gut bacteria, even if you do throw them a little too much Malaysian food sometimes and expect results).
Can two people be an organization? Perhaps it’s better to answer the adjective precursor to this question: can two people be organized? Unfortunately, this second question sets us back to the individual person: one person is often said to be organized or not organized when that person’s actions, desk, and coffee habits seem to adhere to processes and are set up to achieve their individual purposes. So two people can certainly be organized: meeting every day at the same coffee shop, operating under an LLC operating agreement with clearly spelled out roles and ownership, and creating products that meet other peoples’ expectations on a predictable basis. Quacks like an organization. But is it the Limited Liability Company that makes it an organization? Is it the predictability? The geography? The relationship with time? We still seem to be in the muck.
What about two people sitting in the same coffee shop’s outdoor area with laptops open, drinking different coffee drinks and not interacting with each other? This seems like not an organization. So, sharing the same space at the same time isn’t enough. Something about plans, accomplishing things, and orderliness (after a little dictionary action with “organized”). When there’s no interaction, there’s no order or disorder. So some sort of interaction is needed, with order (an order of interactions, as in a handshake before sitting down). The guy sitting across this coffee shop’s outdoor space and I are not accomplishing things together, even if our determined non-eye contact smells like an order of interactions. And we don’t seem to have a plan.
I’m tempted to ask why plans and accomplishing things are necessary. But that would be losing sight of our goal here, a failure of the plan: to define organization. Because something can be defined even if it’s unnecessary or antithetical to metaparasites, er, humans. But does it need to be defined? I think so. Organizations are pervasive and rather parasitic in the year twenty twenty one. They are the parasite kings, assembling potentially symbiotic humans and ensuring that parasitism is the order of events. And parasitism in this case means the subservience of the goals and plans of individual humans to the goals and plans of organizations. Religiosity, employment, voting, representation.
Now don’t get me wrong, ticks and leaches are just as morally acceptable as hummingbirds and honey bees. Nature hath wrought the pollinator symbiote and the bloodsucker. And ticks are pollinators too (diseases have plans and objectives that need support). If it feels like the thread is being lost, I’m right there with you. The idea that things are alike enough that they can be defined as “people” or “bees” and then said to be “organized” is unnecessarily simplifying; it takes the individual bee or person out of their own individual context and implies that they are rather a component of a larger machine. Perhaps useful for measuring an economy or studying the development of honey, but perhaps unnecessary.
So what is [an] organization? It’s an oversimplification of individuals. It’s the fact of every individual. It’s inevitable, inescapable. It’s not “required” because there’s no ultimate authority who could require or not require organization. There will always be plans, goals, and groups. They will always be misunderstood and miscarried, successful and unsuccessful. They will split apart and merge together. And they might look like an organization from one angle and look like random non-interaction from another. Making sense?
Roman Ryan 