We often talk about an organization having a mission, as if the organization exists as some separate entity with its own individual will. But increasingly I’m wondering if that attribution hasn’t always been upside-down. Organizations don’t have missions. Missions have organizations. And when change is necessary, it’s important to know which changes which.
cc flickr Neville Nel
Of course, organizations in the legal sense are often entities separate from their owners, managers, or staff. Long ago, civil society decided to make them separate, and give them some of the rights of individuals — to be party to a contract, to establish ownership or obligation for the entity rather than for its parts. But this was always a legal and economic fiction, not a natural fact.
Somewhere along the way, we started stretching this fiction to consider the organization as some sort of collective organism. And we started talking about the organization having a mission, constructed and confirmed over time by its constituent parts. The mission could be changed, even as the organization remained much the same. Because the organization determined its mission, not the other way around.
But underneath it all, an organization is NOT a separate, sentient entity that can choose its purpose. It is a tool, a resource, a means by which people get things done. An organization is not an organism, it is a crosscut saw, made useful by its structure and design for a particular range of outcomes. When the crosscut saw no longer fits the task, it doesn’t redefine the carpenter or the blueprint, rather the carpenter reaches for a different tool.
Perhaps it’s all semantics, but here’s the larger point: When we consider the organization as a primary, sovereign self, our work inevitably turns toward ensuring its success, survival, and sovereignty. But the organization is not sovereign, nor is it a self. It’s a hand tool in service to a larger purpose. Let’s not be so precious, or so self-important, about changing it up or switching it out.
Yes!!!! Thanks so much for this.
These views (in short, the corporation as a person,) could be correlated to the market fundamentalism reflected in neoliberalism. They might also be correlated to the rising power of arts administrators within arts organizations and the corresponding loss of influence of artists.
Thanks for this article. It was years ago when I was studying accounting while pursuing my MA at the Bolz Center that I first encountered the idea of an organization as an “on-going concern”. It puzzled me that an organization should be considered to last in perpetuity. Perhaps I was being overly literal. Perhaps it was the idea that an organization was a fixed entity.
Recently, Sharon Louden, author/editor of the Artist as Culture Producer, has posted on the idea of the individual behind an organization as the prime mover. “It’s a shame that the NEA and other nonprofits can’t focus on the individuals first and then organizations. Often times, the efforts of individuals are lost/not emphasized enough, but I’m reminded that any forward movement happens first from a sole individual, and often that is the artist.” Economically we trust the institutions and not the individuals. Can we create a new model?