Organization and hierarchy are not the same things. Hierarchy deals with power structures, while organization merely gives structure.
"Flat" does not mean "structureless". It means that there is no power hierarchy. Leadership does not equate to wielding power. There is such a thing as a leader who helps organize equals with out wielding power. And there's research that suggests that the sort of leaders who approach their work as organizing equals achieve better outcomes than those who approach it as commanding subordinates - with or with out hierarchies.
Many people - and you can see it in the comments here - associate flat structures with politics and with invisible power structures. And that does happen to flat structures. That also happens to hierarchies.
Here's the thing - we are not taught how to function in egalitarian organizing contexts. The vast majority of the human organizations in our lives are layed out as some sort of authoritarian power hierarchy, so we get very little practice in flat structures. Most families are an authoritarian hierarchy - parents at the top, kids at the bottom, often with layers of hierarchy based on age. Schools are authoritarian hierarchies - administrators at the top, then teachers, and then the students. The vast majority of businesses are authoritarian hierarchies.
So we never get to practice the skills or become familiar with the mindset necessary to operate in an egalitarian organization. Many of us have to unlearn a lot of bad habits picked up from authoritarian structures before we can really function well in an egalitarian structure.
Which explains so many of the comments here. It's hard to imagine something you've never really experienced. And it's not surprising that folks would have experienced attempts that have gone wrong in one way or another (just as plenty of hierarchical organizations go wrong in one way or another).
All of that said, there is a growing body of sociological evidence though that suggests well done egalitarian organizing structures (IE those done with an awareness of the potential pitfalls) are just as effective, or possibly more effective, then authoritarian hierarchies. And there is proof in the many worker cooperatives that have been successful. We would do well to not simply write that off.
> Which explains so many of the comments here. It's hard to imagine something you've never really experienced.
Or... they just disagree with the assumption that it's even possible for such "egalitarian structures" to exist at scale. In fact, their position might be based on a preponderance of experience.
The "lack of experience" / "you just haven’t seen a good one yet" framing strikes me as a rhetorical strategy to establish the thing you need to show.
> Or... they just disagree with the assumption that it's even possible for such "egalitarian structures" to exist at scale.
As the gp said:
> And there is proof in the many worker cooperatives that have been successful. We would do well to not simply write that off.
The Japanese Consumers' Co-operative Union has 314 member societies with 30 million members (https://jccu.coop/eng/jccu/who-we-are.html). But from the About Us / Profile page, it says they only have 1440 employees, so that doesn't seem like that big of a company.
> Crédit Agricole Group is the largest financial sponsor of the French economy (10th largest bank in the world by total assets, 48 countries covered, 142 000 employees, 52 million customers worldwide).
Yes, as djokkataja points out, and as I pretty clearly alluded to in my post - it's not an assumption. These structures exist and are successful. They are successfully competing in the global markets against more traditional hierarchical corporations.
Mondragon is the canonical example of this working at scale, but there are many others. A more familiar name, if you're in the United States, is Equal Exchange - you may have come across their coffee and chocolate at Whole Foods. There are many, many, many smaller ones (housing cooperatives, small cooperative cafes, collectives, and so on).
They are more common than most people realize, but still rare enough that the vast majority of people probably won't have had experience with successful ones.
> Or... they just disagree with the assumption that it's even possible for such "egalitarian structures" to exist at scale.
Of course it's possible. Market structures (including "smart markets", with elaborate and perhaps quasi-arbitrary rulesets driving desired outcomes) are quite egalitarian, and can easily scale up to thousands or perhaps millions of participants. The relevant question is when and why quasi-hierarchical organizations might become desirable compared to a market or agoric structure made up of arms-length, strictly codified interactions.
> And real markets aren’t egalitarian, see the bailouts
A market as heavily regulated, subsidized, and insured by the government as banking is hardly a central example of a "real market".
That being said, I'm not even sure what people mean by "egalitarian" in this context, and so I don't know whether the term should be applied to markets or not.
I like the distinctions you made and I think it gets at something that I think separates the 'good' part of hierarchies with the 'bad'. You can't have a big organization without some people whose job it is to think at higher levels of abstraction, or to manage communication channels You need the structure of an organization with managers and executives just so everyone isn't always talking to everyone else. But I think of my manager as an equal with unique expertise in understanding how my work fits in with the rest of the organization. It's not that I can't know those things, but thats one of his dedicated responsibilities. Likewise I don't always have to think about what to communicate to which exec/director. So there's structure there, but we each have a similar vote on the team. The one are where I'd question a value of anti-hierarchy is expediency in breaking ties. I tie breaker seems to be expressing power, not just adding structure or playing a role.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned a very common non-hierarchal manager: the agile coach/scrum master.
On most of my teams, that has been the single most effective management relationship, and I think a big part of that is that neither of us has power over the other. The lack of hierarchy encourages a symbiotic relationship... oftentimes, "how can we work together to make sure both of our bosses are happy with things?"
Point me to any animal with a nervous system that does not have a power/dominance hierarchy. This is just the same, tired Rousseauian social theory as always. At some point, one should ask why humans (or indeed any animal) never quite manages to train or educate the power dynamics away. It has literally never happened — not even once. If you still think it can, you need to be very precise in arguing how, and very original.
Of course the power dynamics never completely go away. There are a myriad of kinds of power dynamics - gender, race, and class up bringing all bring their own forms of power dynamics, to say nothing of just basic interpersonal interaction styles. The point of these structures isn't that the eliminate power dynamics entirely, but that they do not codify additional power dynamics into the structure of the organization. The organization's structure is intentionally formed to level the power dynamics as much as possible to allow the most input from the most people. It's just democracy, applied to business organizations. And there's quite a bit of sociological evidence - *empirical* evidence building that it is just as effective, and possibly more effective than the hierarchy.
A human society with the same level of hierarchy as most animals would be the most egalitarian society to exist basically since the invention of agriculture.
A wolf pack is a nuclear family with the parents in charge. If that were the primary organizing principle for a human society, we would consider that pure anarchism.
"Flat" does not mean "structureless". It means that there is no power hierarchy. Leadership does not equate to wielding power. There is such a thing as a leader who helps organize equals with out wielding power. And there's research that suggests that the sort of leaders who approach their work as organizing equals achieve better outcomes than those who approach it as commanding subordinates - with or with out hierarchies.
Many people - and you can see it in the comments here - associate flat structures with politics and with invisible power structures. And that does happen to flat structures. That also happens to hierarchies.
Here's the thing - we are not taught how to function in egalitarian organizing contexts. The vast majority of the human organizations in our lives are layed out as some sort of authoritarian power hierarchy, so we get very little practice in flat structures. Most families are an authoritarian hierarchy - parents at the top, kids at the bottom, often with layers of hierarchy based on age. Schools are authoritarian hierarchies - administrators at the top, then teachers, and then the students. The vast majority of businesses are authoritarian hierarchies.
So we never get to practice the skills or become familiar with the mindset necessary to operate in an egalitarian organization. Many of us have to unlearn a lot of bad habits picked up from authoritarian structures before we can really function well in an egalitarian structure.
Which explains so many of the comments here. It's hard to imagine something you've never really experienced. And it's not surprising that folks would have experienced attempts that have gone wrong in one way or another (just as plenty of hierarchical organizations go wrong in one way or another).
All of that said, there is a growing body of sociological evidence though that suggests well done egalitarian organizing structures (IE those done with an awareness of the potential pitfalls) are just as effective, or possibly more effective, then authoritarian hierarchies. And there is proof in the many worker cooperatives that have been successful. We would do well to not simply write that off.