Sep 13 2016
Community – organization difference
Since I did a talk at CHIFOO last May, I continue to think about situations where a community and an organization coincide or are closely intertwined. In comparison with how community and organization interact in other circumstances, it’s the churches and meditation groups depicted on the right that highlight the differences between the two regimes most clearly. These different settings have been on my mind for years.
But I think that the coexistence of organizational and community regimes is the norm, even though the contrast is clearer is some circumstances more than others. Here’s a table that’s evolving to describe how I think of the difference between the two regimes:
Organizational
logic |
Community
logic |
|
Rests upon |
Civic or economic system |
Social fabric |
How roles are set
|
Contracted / appointed |
Negotiated / evolved / reputed |
Surrounding
membrane |
Coase’s Theorem |
Legitimate peripheral participation |
Kind of entity
|
A legal person |
A tradition
|
How mapped
|
Hierarchical org chart?
Chart of accounts? |
Stories, texts, places, events
|
Value created
|
Adding to a value chain,
delivering a product |
Reifying
community, practice, domain |
Communication
structure |
Go through channels
|
Many-to-many,
some-to-some
|
Time investment |
Depends on mandate
|
Depends on perceived value |
What seems tricky to me about thinking of these two in comparison to each other is that we constantly switch from one regime to the other — usually without thought or awareness.
One response so far
I just added another row at the bottom — time investment. Not ready for an complete update or a rewrite, so resorting to changing a blog post after the fact.