Organisation and community LO7120

Dr Ilfryn Price (101701.3454@compuserve.com)
Thu, 2 May 1996 03:16:51 -0400

Rol said :

>I would have said organizations are groups of people tied together by
>common goals. Communities are groups of people tied together by common
>goals. Therefore..

Jackie said:

>>--my personnal belief is that organizations can not be compared to
>>communities. organizations are tied to earnings, communities are tied to
>>living. these are two different things.

> I agree. It would be interesting to have an intercultural melee
>on this. Most places have a worker/management conflict to heal, but the
>US, with the legacy of a highly flexible, highly mobile, immigrant
>workforce and a "wild west" mythology, is the only place I can think of
>that has so drastically divorced itself from a sense of place, a sense
>contunity with a local community and/or government, that it can consider
>itself as an independent abstraction, answering to no one. I, too, am
>wary of an "organization as community" solution.

I agree both, It reminds me of Tom Lloyd's book [Nice Company 1990] where
he draws to spheres of company and 'society/political' values and examines
the degree to which they permeate. Both are composed the same way [as Rol
says] but one seeks to escape the other [as Jackie says]. Much of
corporate America [and much of what's left of corporate UK] follows a long
heritage of institutions seeking to escape the constraints of the wider
social values [religous and political elites, industrial elites, military
elites, soothsayers, witch doctors, oracles in temples', Easter Island
Statue carvers, and all sosts of other precursors of the company have
tried the same trick before].

The organisation is a community that wishes to escape the influence of
other communities and do its own thing. The challenge is to stop it doing
so, which is where wider belief sets, freedom of the press, Self Evident
Truths and other things connect back into the picture.

If Price
The Harrow Partnership
Pewley Fort Guildford UK
101701.3454@compuserve.com

-- 

Dr Ilfryn Price <101701.3454@compuserve.com>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>