Organizing Locally: How the New Decentralists Improve Education, Health Care, and Trade
312
Organizing Locally: How the New Decentralists Improve Education, Health Care, and Trade
312Overview
Fuller first untangles the economic and cultural currents that have eroded the efficacy of—and our trust in—large institutions over the past half century. From there we meet intrepid leaders who have been doing things differently. Traveling from a charter school in San Francisco to a veterans service network in Iowa, from a Pennsylvania health-care firm to the Manhattan branch of a Swedish bank, he explores how creative managers have turned local staff loose to craft inventive practices, untethered from central rules and plain-vanilla routines. By holding their successes and failures up to the same analytical light, he vividly reveals the key cornerstones of social organization on which motivating and effective decentralization depends. Ultimately, he brings order and evidence to the often strident debates about who has the power—and on what scale—to structure how we work and live locally.
Written for managers, policy makers, and reform activists, Organizing Locally details the profound decentering of work and life inside firms, unfolding across postindustrial societies. Its fresh theoretical framework explains resurging faith in decentralized organizations and the ingredients that deliver vibrant meaning and efficacy for residents inside. Ultimately, it is a synthesizing study, a courageous and radical new way of conceiving of American vitality, creativity, and ambition.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226246680 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Bruce Fuller is professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Growing Up Modern, Government Confronts Culture, Inside Charter Schools, and Standardized Childhood. His writings appear in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Commonweal.
Read an Excerpt
Organizing Locally
How the New Decentralists Improve Education, Health Care, and Trade
By Bruce Fuller, Mary Berg, Danfeng Soto-Vigil Koon, Lynette Parker
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-24668-0
CHAPTER 1
The Drive to Decentralize—After Hierarchies and Markets Disappoint
You may have noticed. Purportedly mature grown-ups often resemble testy toddlers as they struggle mightily to cooperate, whether disparately laboring at work or haggling over contentious public issues.
We cling to our cars rather than hopping on the bus with others. Out in the suburbs we awkwardly hesitate to knock on the neighbor's door to fetch a cup of sugar. On a broader canvas our not-so-civil leaders routinely retreat into ideological caves rather than cooperating to squarely face pressing problems.
One way of nurturing more engaging forms of cooperation is to shift the authority and resources held by centralized institutions or corporate firms down to local actors. This book delves into America's blossoming yet rather unruly experiment with doing just that: decentralizing the power, capital, and know-how necessary for getting work done, long held by faraway managers, down to practitioners at the grass roots.
Indeed, colorful shoots of reseeded localism push up all around us. Take that newly sprouted farmers market in town, perhaps the inventive charter school down the street, or your local doctor who's joined a market-savvy health maintenance organization. Even the friendly nerd at the Apple Store who sports a bright T-shirt must signal not only being hip and expert but also that she comes from nearby.
Americans have long cast a skeptical eye on hierarchies—whether top-down ways of organizing work, setting moral precepts, or when central authorities try to dampen democratic discourse. Old World political and social hierarchies were soundly rejected at the nation's birth. Still, nineteenth-century America would fall star struck for the efficiency of modern factories, the humming of endless assembly lines, which delivered unprecedented levels of material comfort and stoked a burgeoning middle class.
But fast-forward to the last half of the twentieth century, as America experienced rising disaffection with large and faceless institutions and skepticism sank deeper over the flailing efficacy of government, along with the costly moral lapses of Wall Street, huge corporations, not to mention the Catholic Church. These currents would erode faith in centralized institutions and undercut aging renditions of social authority, a singular moral compass that now simply pointed toward a disaffecting destination.
Western thinkers—going back to Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson—long argued for political pluralism and democratic vitality at the grass roots, favoring the individual's rights over the conforming prerogatives of centralized agents. But they could not have foreseen the colorful, decentered variability in how contemporary Americans now get work done locally, or the kaleidoscopic ways in which we find meaning in daily life. Nor could these early modernists—obsessed with the reified individual and stigmatizing "backward" communities—have envisaged how contemporary decentralists now aim to shape cooperative action across countless local commons, village by village.
We have witnessed a pantheon of big hierarchies breaking apart in recent decades—school bureaucracies, health-care institutions, telecom and high-tech companies—devolving their core remnants down to disparate communities, then ceding discretion over resources and tools to local practitioners. Civic leaders urge that we "think globally, act locally," progressives urge us to "buy local." Even multinational firms that exploit workers overseas, like those pitching smartphones and electronic tablets with cool adverts, must look local to gain legitimacy.
One initial question is why, after two centuries of modern hierarchy and routinized forms of work, have centralized organizations lost social authority and economic clout? And why at this point in Western history are we experiencing renewed vitality in localism—decentering how work is organized across wide slices of the economy, along with the centrifugal variety of social affiliations and lifestyles that now mark American society? These quandaries motivated our journey to the variety of organizations that you are about to explore.
The story unfolds in three parts, yielding the core thesis. First, I describe the stiff winds, the powerful economic and ideological currents, that continue to topple hierarchies and central nodes of social authority, which have anchored nation-states since the seventeenth-century dawn of the modern era. Second, I describe the differing ways in which massive organizations—be they public institutions or corporate firms—seek to decentralize, tracking the renewed interest in localism that's sweeping across many postindustrial societies. And third, we have corralled what is known about the (uneven) empirical results of first-wave experiments in decentralization, focusing on education, health, and technology sectors—where the urge to disassemble hierarchies has gained unstoppable momentum over the past half century.
Then we arrive at the question going forward: How might decentered ways of organizing social action or productive enterprise become more effective in lifting learning, health, and trade? And the flipside: How does the residue of modern hierarchy—in which capital, expertise, and authority remain lodged—still hamper labor or cooperative action at the grass roots? This requires uncovering the fine-grain social practices that lead to effective decentralization. So to learn about how decentered social action may pay off for clients and practitioners alike, we spent two to three years inside a wide variety of organizations spread across differing sectors, each experiencing varying levels of success.
This opening chapter details the contemporary economic and ideological forces, emerging in the 1950s, that prompted decentralizing forms of social organization, now sweeping across huge swaths of postindustrial economies. I begin with the contemporary arc of America's own rekindled fascination with localism—bubbling up from the Beat Generation as social criticism arose over the human cost of industrial routine and white-collar conformity. The 1960s of course fortified this multipronged attack on mass institutions, from huge universities that put undergraduates on alienating treadmills, to a national government that chose to lie about matters of life and death. The colorful forces of pluralism and diversity would stir the culture wars, channeling the old mainstream into a thousand rivulets of ethnic affiliations, sexual preferences, and lifestyles.
On material fronts, the evolving global economy and cheap wages overseas pushed manufacturing overseas, rendering hierarchical org charts less relevant to how work came to be organized stateside in postindustrial times. And one remaining myth—the American Dream of endless upward mobility—would be shattered more recently, as middle-class wages declined and inequalities worsened, a coarseness not seen since the Gilded Age of the 1920s.
These telling economic and cultural shifts now animate decentralization in public and private sectors alike, not to mention the vast organizational territory that lies in between. In fact, the new decentralists have left behind both the archetypal centralized hierarchy and textbook renditions of unfettered markets. Most of us now labor in organizations—from health care to education, the finance industry to design and trade—where faraway rules and dictates matter little for our everyday practice. Only the likes of roadside fruit vendors and rug dealers still operate in pure markets. Contemporary firms now compete and vie for legitimacy within mixed markets, characterized by light regulation and institutional habits of how work gets done.
Looking inside contemporary organizations, the industrial hierarchy has become a dying method for arranging human labor, jettisoned by many sectors while persisting in dusty corners of the welfare state. The factory model of breaking down complex production endeavors—from assembling cars to washing machines—into predictable and routinized tasks suffers from declining technical utility and alienating social effects. Contemporary work and postindustrial forms of human cooperation now involve lifting the learning or shifting the behavior of clients or patients, authoring design ideas or computer code, and inspiring the work of others. This means that the material tools and social agility required to improve one's practice can no longer be proscribed and controlled from above.
As organizational leaders and local practitioners began to adapt to these tectonic shifts, a first-generation discourse and strategy for devolving authority and resources first emerged about four decades ago. Old hierarchies and regimentation proved a deadly climate for technological innovation, as inventive managers in the electronics industry aimed to liberate their designers and software writers. The organizing notion of a slim and supportive center from which managers set free their local production units gained credibility in a widening array of corporate sectors, then migrated into the public sector by the early 1990s. Would not inventive schools, health clinics, or housing agencies find more effective ways to organize cooperation on the ground when severed from faraway bureaucracies, no longer hog-tied by rules and a deep-seated compliance mentality?
First-generation decentralists focused their battles on breaking away, to secede from the bureaucratic center or corporate headquarters. At times these first-wave pioneers were seduced by the idealized elegance of market theory, while rarely getting to the question of how they would better engage and motivate clients. Without a guiding and resourceful center, how would small-scale units stabilize revenues and enrich their grassroots practice, often struggling to survive in uncertain markets?
But I am getting ahead of the story. Let's back up and examine why the postindustrial desire to decentralize vast organizations first took root a half century ago and how a field of wildflowers did blossom, becoming a rather unkempt garden.
The Demise of Hierarchy
Everyday work and forms of human cooperation will continue to decentralize—to break apart from hierarchical nodes of capital and institutional authority—spurred by the postindustrial nature of labor and multiplicity of moral and cultural tenets that now variably guide our everyday lives. This is the leading edge of my argument. America's emerging position in the global economy requires work that aims to engage or lift human beings, not to churn out standardized widgets. It requires social cooperation led by thoughtful practitioners who aim to motivate learning or healthier behavior, lift the well-being of various clients, or perhaps sketch innovative designs or clever software. As macroeconomic forces reshape labor demand, how to get ahead in America and how to craft a meaningful life have already splintered into a variety of pathways.
This chapter first describes four stiff winds that have gained velocity and strength over the past half century—shifting the institutional landscape in which labor is organized and performed together, along with the tools and human agility required to get work done locally. These telling economic and ideological forces also open up space for the fresh generation of decentralists that you will meet in the middle chapters. These stiff forces set the environment in which organizations must seek legitimacy and resources, and cast how the work of individuals is coordinated and supported locally.
The new decentralists at times incentivize individuals to help move local practices; they are not averse to deploying economic carrots. But they are cultivating new forms of cooperative action and solidarity on the ground as well, not mechanically controlling their local staff or tossing clients into competitive, uncaring markets. A generation ago, sociologist Peter Evans claimed that the state and the market were the "master institutions of society." I argue that this earlier reality has become a fading historical artifact, eclipsed by where work now occurs for most and lateral forms of social cooperation that have come to hold legitimacy in the eyes of clients, customers, and citizens.
Next, I briefly sketch the four major drivers of decentralized organizing in postindustrial societies. Then each force will be examined in greater depth, looking into the origins and consequences for the decentralization of institutions and authority over the past half century.
Blowing Out the Center
One gale-force wind that has flattened large hierarchies originates in America's shifting position in the global economy. The decline of manufacturers and their standardized production routines has received ample attention from management gurus and business writers. But it's the shifting social organization of work—recast in huge sectors, like education, health care, and white-collar services—that's most telling in accounting for the decentering of postindustrial firms. This is work performed by practitioners on the ground who must deploy their wits and knowledge in rather unpredictable ways. The motivations of local clients are equally variable and fickle—from students to patients and bank customers to serving our most disadvantaged citizens. Practitioners in decentralized firms must have expertise and resources at their fingertips to engage and motivate their clients, which can't be regulated by far-off hierarchies.
Closely tied to these macroeconomic shifts and the decentering of work are the faltering fiscal capacity and legitimacy of central government. And this exemplifies the wider demise of central beacons of social authority, which includes the dissolution of once-dominant, often monochromatic lifestyles and cultural guideposts. The unraveling of pyramid-like hierarchy stems not only from the plotting of conservatives and neoliberals. Faithful fans of the central state, critical of market remedies in the public sector, blame conservatives. But it's the cultural Left, going back to the Beats, that still wages unrelenting attacks on universal norms and social regulation from above. Pluralistic groups have largely succeeded in shifting once-private affiliations and identities—whether bounded by ethnicity, gender, language, disability, or sexual preference—into the civic sphere, as the late philosopher Richard Rorty pointed out a generation ago. The personal has become political.
This cultural subversion of central authority interacts with the shifting sands of material conditions. One key example is declining trust in faraway Washington, witnessed since the Vietnam and Watergate eras. This acts to undermine government's fiscal strength, already battered by rocky economic shoals and treacherous levels of public debt, leading to a third force that makes matter worse for the central state: the demographic graying of America.
Even as postindustrial nations recovered (partially) from the financial collapse of 2008, still adapting to the long-running loss of manufacturing jobs, this third factor would undercut the state's fiscal resolve: the rising share of public spending required to buoy the health and pensions of aging boomers. If government and massive firms are to deliver on their promise of secure retirement, they now must shed other programs and public responsibilities. Central bureaucracies must pare back or offload other functions to local agencies or lightly regulated markets of nonprofit organizations. And meanwhile, collateral private sectors are stoked by demands expressed by aging retirees. Health care, social services, and the entire leisure industry now thrive, along with their local practitioners who engage and serve their graying clients.
These three forces, in turn, spur the fourth driver of decentralization: the rise of nonprofit and for-profit firms that pursue public projects. Government, in fact, doesn't run much anymore beyond the military and police services, not to mention riveting post offices and the department of motor vehicles. Instead, the state bureaucracy increasingly funds and softly monitors quasi-public organizations on the ground, including charter schools, health maintenance organizations, transport firms, even profit seekers that help run prisons and military campaigns. And the shift toward mixed markets of NGOs flows with the rise of labor that's dedicated to lifting students, patients, retirees, and white-collar clients.
The shifting economics of energy further fuels the creation of nonprofit firms and social enterprises. As energy costs climb, faraway management of production or human services becomes less sustainable economically. So instead we see the rise of locally rooted firms like Car Share in San Francisco, or the nonprofit Farmers Market Federation that helps New York City neighborhoods host marketplaces, all nascent elements of what Jeremy Rifkin calls "the collaborative economy." Sharing is becoming both hip and profitable as household income slips and consumers look for less costly alternatives. A portion of the share economy is growing well beyond edgy and idealistic endeavors. Avis Rental Car moved in 2013 to buy Zipcar for a cool half-billion dollars. "We see car sharing as highly complementary to traditional car rental, with rapid growth potential and representing a scalable opportunity," Avis CEO Ronald L. Nelson said.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Organizing Locally by Bruce Fuller, Mary Berg, Danfeng Soto-Vigil Koon, Lynette Parker. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface1 The Drive to Decentralize—After Markets and Hierarchies Disappoint
2 How Decentralized Organizations Work
with Danfeng Soto-Vigil Koon
3 Organizing Health Care from the Ground Up
with Mary Berg
4 International Banking Goes Local—Swedish Organizing in New York
5 The Four R’s—A School Where Relationships Come First
with Lynette Parker
6 The Limits of Localism—Lifting Vets in Iowa
7 Learning from the New Decentralists—Cornerstones of Local Organizing
Methods Appendix
Notes
References
Index
What People are Saying About This
“This is an enormously ambitious study, essentially taking on all organizational change of the past half century. Fuller places the move toward decentralized organizations into a thought-provoking portrait of success and failure of those trying to improve on the well-being of society. Moreover, while these societal institutions continue to evolve, he provides a map for understanding the continuing process.”
“It is fairly easy to point out what is not working in medicine and why. But if I was given the opportunity to change some of it, would I lean towards more or less local control? Would I hire health educators, promoters, or patient navigators to improve the support and services for the families I care for? How would I rethink patient centeredness in the delivery of care? Fuller tackles complex questions such as these across a range of sectors, providing an approach that would help many businesses, institutions, networks, and systems grapple with the pressures to meet client needs and save costs.”
“After eras dominated by economics-talk, it is refreshing to dip into a vision in which culture and social psychology play central roles. This is in some ways a call to arms, but it is not as didactic or gloomy as those to which we’ve become accustomed. It stirs the pot of what have become somewhat stale debates, and by incorporating such a broad range of cases extends its relevance far and wide.”