Article 23
Alternatives to Vertical Relating and Control- Part 1
by Wendell Krossa
(From the series "Creating A Horizontal God", Copyright, W. Krossa)

There have been innumerable attempts to reform the institutions and organizations of modern nation states- to humanize them. These have often been efforts to increase public or member participation in decision making processes but far too often these efforts amount to little more than what is known as tokenism. They are rarely serious efforts to equally share power and most often only a reluctant elite response to appease growing anger from the bottom. Ultimately, these halfhearted measures do more damage than good as they only increase resentment when people sense they are only being used and further manipulated by ruling elites.

 

It is time to quit playing games and to move beyond tokenism. It is time for powerless people to take back full control of their lives and to take full control of the critical issues which shape their destinies and affect their well-being in profound ways.

 

As Murray Bookchin once said "You may have changes in the economy, you may have changes in who rules, you may have changes in who rules what and in who rules who, but there is no revolution without freedom, and there is no freedom without individuals controlling the conditions of their lives" (Quoted by Joyce Rothschild in The Cooperative Workplace, p. 145). Rothschild's book illustrates a variety of efforts by people to democratically run organizations, which in her words "represent one part of a larger drive to recreate human-scale, decentralized institutions in the community and in the workplace. To the extent that they democratize organizations, they return the locus of control to the individual" (Ibid, p.145).

 

Citizen Control

In the effort to regain more control over our lives, we want to first of all note some useful criteria from Sherry Arnstein that can help people to evaluate the extent to which they are genuinely in control of their own lives. Arnstein offers a useful tool for evaluating the extent to which citizens or organizational members are really empowered in the institutions they belong to. She calls this the ladder of citizen or member participation (Sherry Arnstein. 1969. "A Ladder Of Citizen Participation" in AIP Journal).

 

She notes that participation in government is the cornerstone of democracy but there is a vast difference between "the empty ritual of participation and having the real power needed to affect the outcome of the process" (Ibid, p.216). She quotes others who affirm that participation without redistribution of power is an empty and frustrating process for the powerless. It insults human sensibility and violates all sense of freedom, justice and equality.

 

In thinking of empty rituals of participation, voting comes immediately to mind. While governing elites have blown voting into mythological proportions as the main evidence of true freedom in modern democracies, in reality, voting is very much an empty token ritual used to appease citizenry.

 

One vote every 4-7 years in matters of extremely limited choice does not give members of modern states genuine control over the critical factors affecting their lives and destinies. In most states, after elections, governing elites promptly proceed to ignore the will of citizens and press their own agendas in concert with other powerholding elites in the state.

 

A commentator for a local paper in Canada noted perceptively that an upcoming election "lets democracy operate for just 12 hours every four or five years. From then until the next election we are ruled by a benign dictatorship" (Noel Wright. 1997. "Fake Democracy Looms Once Again" in North Shore News, p.6).

 

Free voting, along with myths of free market economies, is used to try to convince people they are really free, while in reality critical political and economic decision making processes in contemporary free market states continue to be firmly controlled by small groups of elite powerholders.

 

The increasing recognition by citizens of modern nation states that voting is an empty token ritual has resulted in historic lows of voter turnout for elections (Martin Wittenberg, "Should Election Day Be A Holiday?", The Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 1998, p.42).

 

It will never be possible to deal properly with the problem of powerlessness and its devastating consequences until citizens take more active control over all of the critical issues affecting their lives. To be truly empowered as human beings, citizens must demand more responsible control at the bottom. And to operate in a truly democratic manner, any responsibility passed on to elected representatives must contain some mechanism to ensure that full control is always maintained by citizens in local areas and ensure that representatives can be called to account by local people at any time on any given issue. Currently, elected representatives leave their areas for power centers and are given too much authority to make decisions on behalf of citizens without a strict accountability to those citizens. Too often the decisions made in power centers reflect politicians yielding to the interests of powerful economic and political groups in those remote centers of power, to the neglect of the wishes of those who elected them.

 

We would also add that citizen control is not just a novel idea to play with. It is essential for human well-being and development.

 

Returning to Arnstein's ladder, note that it contains three stages with a variety of steps at each stage.

 

1. The first stage is nonparticipation which begins with direct manipulation. This first step in this stage involves the placement of token people on advisory boards with the intention of gaining their support for decisions made by powerholders.

 

A second step is where government or corporations will involve citizens in planning, in order for experts to subject the citizens to powerholder influence which is intended to help citizens adjust their attitudes and values to agree with those of the powerholders. This is known as therapy.

 

Informing is the third step in this first stage. Here the emphasis is on a one way flow of information- with powerholders informing citizens and with no feedback or negotiation. The purpose of these first three steps is to "educate or to cure participants" (Sherry Arnstein, p.217). It is quite simply callous manipulation.

 

2. The next stage is tokenism with the first step of this stage involving consultation. This encompasses accepting citizen's opinions, but it offers no assurance that citizen concerns will be taken seriously into account, says Arnstein. Often, decisions have already been made by powerholders and in consultation they are simply allowing citizens to vent. This is all part of the current fad of public participation and public processes.

 

The other step in tokenism is placation. This may involve placing a few citizens on governing boards or committees. But these placements are often a minority group and they have no real power to influence decisions. Powerholders, says Arnstein, retain the right to decide.

 

3. The final stage involves degrees of citizen power. First, in partnership, power is redistributed through negotiation between citizens and powerholders. Planning and decision making are shared.

 

The next step is delegated power where citizens achieve dominant decision making authority over certain plans or programs. But in such giving of power, powerholders still retain the right to take it back.

 

The final step, according to Arnstein, is genuine citizen control where have nots gain greater power over their lives. This means participants or residents actually govern programs or institutions. Such citizen control is seen in neighborhood or citizen governments which can create and control a variety of decentralized services such as police protection, education systems, and health programs or facilities.

 

A variety of cities have suggested experiments in neighborhood or community based government. Such decentralized governance would involve the granting of power to communities to control critical decision making processes such as collecting taxes and making spending decisions. People involved in such experiments raise the issue of basic intercommunity standards to protect against externalities from other communities. For instance, one community may decide to spend its money on parks and neglect sanitation. This would then have negative health impacts on surrounding communities. This raises the question of how you would deal with these issues that impact on others? There are a wide array of similar issues to be dealt with in the move to more citizen or community control.

 

Also, many citizens currently do not want to be bothered with involvement in governing their own communities. It will take time to develop participatory attitudes and the structures to encourage such attitudes. Rothschild has argued that "Where people do not have participatory habits, it is because they have not generally been allowed any substantive control over important decisions... Nondemocratic (pyramidal) habits are indeed a problem for democratic groups, but they are not a problem that a redistribution of power could not resolve. Admittedly, the evidence is not entirely in on this issue, but much of it does indicate that the practise of democracy itself develops the capacity for democratic behavior among its participants" (Joyce Rothschild. 1989. The Cooperative Workplace, p.68). Human well-being and development make it absolutely imperative that we keep moving in the direction of such community control.

 

Evaluating Control In Communities or Organizations

To detect what sort of power or control exists in any given situation, simply ask the people at the lowest positions in the social order of that situation, what are the critical issues that determine the goals, the operating functions, the monitoring, and the direction of the organization or community they are a part of. Then ask those people what type of control they feel they have over those critical issues- using something like Arnstein's ladder of control. This should provide them with some insight into the nature of control existing in their situation. It would be especially helpful to focus evaluation on decision making processes that control important resources or issues. Ask all of the people affected by those decisions if they feel they have equal input or control over such decision making processes.

 

Elite Fear of Freedom

Powerholding elites dread the loss of power and control and have devised numerous excuses for refusing to seriously redistribute power. One common argument they make is that granting power to citizens or organizational members will result in unmanageable chaos.

 

The assumption is that without strong commanding leaders controlling everything below them, chaos and anarchy will erupt. This is an insult to the common sense of people and it slanders people's ability to govern themselves effectively. It arrogantly assumes that only an elite few know what is best for all others.

 

It is an insult to average humans because it presumes that people will run insanely wild in the streets without strict hierarchical control. This presumption by elites that anarchy will erupt, views and treats people as stupid children who lack any sense of how to cooperate and solve problems.

 

It is also a suspicious charge coming from contemporary powerholders in governments and corporations. Contemporary organizational leadership in our societies has no right to raise such issues of possible collapse or screwup without their control. It is hard to imagine that citizens could make a worse mess of economies, the environment, and other areas of life than the mess that has already been made by the traditional centralized leadership of states and organizations.

 

In fact, I would be quick to bet that people at the bottom would do a far better job in governing themselves and their environment because they would take more responsibility for the well-being of their own areas and resources. Distantly located elites lack that same sense of local responsibility.

 

Another thought arises in relation to the elite fear of loss of control. Do powerholding elites envision the movement of their nation and its programs in a certain predetermined direction and does the idea of their not being able to control the movement of all programs according to that plan, mean chaos? If citizens decide to move a nation and its programs in different directions- is that really chaos and anarchy, or just freedom for healthy diversity?

 

Chaos will not result if hierarchical control is ended. We are not arguing for leaderless existence, anyway. But, we do need a radically redefined leadership, a leadership which is shared amongst all participants at the bottom in any given system that requires cooperation. In Rothschild's words we are arguing for human organizations "without domination in that the ultimate authority is based in the group as a whole, not in the individual" (Ibid, p.52). This is simply the demand for government of, for, and by the people in reality, not just in word.

 

We prefer the term cooperation instead of governance as governance connotes the need to have powerholders and people who control decision making. To the contrary, shared leadership must be open to all members of a given cooperative effort. It must be nonhierarchical and decentralized- easily accessible to all. It must genuinely empower all members to have control of critical factors affecting their lives and communities.

 

Initially, a change from traditional hierarchical leadership may appear to be chaotic. It will seem to be chaotic, especially to those who believe their ideas embody the only correct pattern of life for all and who are used to having their own way and used to having power to coerce others to follow that way.

 

In reality, healthy diversity, not chaos, emerges when the rigid control of hierarchical leadership is diminished or removed. Such diversity and complexity are very healthy as they provide more creative options for any system to succeed and thrive. This reason, of course, is aside from the more important fact that it is simply human to remove hierarchical control and this alone is sufficient reason to do so. You will not have anarchy when you remove hierarchical control. You will have human existence with freedom for healthy human diversity. This will improve the health, productivity, and survivability of any system.

 

One could also respond to the suggestion that anarchy might prevail in the absence of hierarchical control with Colin Ward's "theory of spontaneous order" (quoted in The Cooperative Workplace, p.15). Ward states that "given a common need, a collection of people will, by trial and error, by improvisation and experiment, evolve order out of chaos- this order being more durable and more closely related to their needs than any kind of externally imposed order" (Ibid). And because it is not an externally imposed order, it will have the genuine support of the people it comes from.

 

I would suspect that the real reason some people want to maintain strict control of others is, as we noted above, due to the arrogant belief that they alone have the insight and the right life plan for everyone. These people can not tolerate the thought of others differing from them and the 'enlightened insight' they hold. This is an extremely dangerous attitude to hold in regard to other people and it has resulted in much inhuman treatment of powerless people. Some have even gone to the extent of controlling others in the belief that they are acting for the good of the controlled. This overbearing concern for the good of others that leads to control of others is dangerously inhuman. Aside from this, many powerholders simply do not want to give up the special benefits and opportunities that come with power.

 

Another argument raised to defend the continued use of strict hierarchical control is that of efficiency. In favor of this viewpoint, it has long been argued that hierarchy is more efficient than egalitarian alternatives.

 

Efficiency is certainly the primary goal of all hierarchical systems of organization. But ongoing research is raising serious questions about the supposed efficiency of hierarchical relating (Kathy Iannello. 1992. Decisions Without Hierarchy, p.9, 17, 18, 23). In fact, it is now believed that efficiency is better served in nonhierarchical egalitarian systems of organizing. Inefficiency is now becoming a charge that hierarchies must answer and defend themselves against.

 

More importantly, the primary goal of any system of organizing humans must not be efficiency alone, but the fostering of true human development, relating, and existence. This is the central purpose of life and state institutions or social organizations must support this purpose or they will only continue to operate to destroy true human relating and existence. Efficiency is a valid concern in life but it must never supplant basic human rights and needs.

 

We need to place the issues and arguments surrounding bottomup control in their proper historical context in order to give a sense of the inevitability of movement in this direction. The contemporary movement toward more egalitarian organizations and consensus models of decision making is part of a worldwide move away from representative forms of government toward citizen control forms which are known as participatory democracy. This contemporary movement toward participatory democracy is an expression of the wider ongoing emergence of humanity and its demand for the free relating of true equals. It is an inevitable historical movement away from domination and control.

 

There has been resistance to the human movement toward genuine freedom and equality but the ongoing emergence of humanity will never be deterred for long. For millennia states and societies have dragged their feet by hanging on to archaic vertically oriented structures of domination. But these structures can never assist in the development of true human relating or existence. It is time to make a complete break with these vertical forms of relating and start moving toward radically horizontalized forms of structuring. These alone can support true freedom and equality.

 

Modified Consensus

In regard to more egalitarian forms of organizing and the shift to consensus based decision making processes, Kathy Iannello promotes an interesting model of decision making which is not hierarchical and which offers operating principles to support a more human form of relating and existence. Her model is called modified consensus (Ibid, p.118) and though she focuses on the workplace, her basic principles could apply to a wide variety of situations in life.

 

Iannello's model enables every person to take more responsibility for and more control over their own life and work. As we have stated often before, this personal responsibility and control is essential to becoming fully human. Modified consensus helps people to move away from hierarchical domination, with its dehumanizing control, toward more genuinely human relating which is horizontally oriented, treats all as equals, and empowers people with full personal responsibility.

 

Even though we have long existed in a world of hierarchical organizations and any serious change sometimes seems improbable, Iannello argues that it is possible to fundamentally and radically change our social orders into a world of nonhierarchical existence.

 

Efficiency is Horizontally Oriented

Iannello defines decision making by consensus as a process where "all members of an organization have the opportunity to discuss matters of policy until a decision acceptable to everyone is reached. It is this process of discussion, delay, and non-voting that has led to charges of inefficiency" (p. xii).

 

She responds to this charge of inefficiency by explaining that "Modified consensus answers the problem of efficiency through the outward (not downward) delegation of routine decisions to those in the organization with particular skills and knowledge in what all members of the organization determine to be routine areas. But critical decisions, those that determine the overall path and goals, are retained for the entire membership and are arrived at consensually. This is very different from decision making in hierarchies, in which critical decisions are made by the few at the top of the organization" (p.xii).

 

This distinction between critical and routine decisions offers great potential for alternatives to hierarchy. Iannello explains that delegating routine decisions horizontally can involve additional responsibility, authority and expertise for some people, but it does not need to consequently result in superior/subordinate relationships. The goal is always to reserve critical decisions for the entire membership and to delegate routine decisions to various members with the expertise to handle such decisions.

 

The distinction between critical and routine decisions also promises to cut wasted time in meetings, time that is often spent on routine issues that could be delegated out to others. Such delegation of minor issues leaves more time for the critical issues that are often ignored in the rush to cover too much detail.

 

As we noted above, though Iannello refers mainly to workplace situations we believe her principles can be usefully applied to many other situations. Most importantly, her distinction between critical and mundane issues holds real value for maintaining efficiency in egalitarian relationships.

 

Traditionally, cooperative organizations have tried to maintain egalitarian relationships by rotating people among organization tasks in order to prevent any one person from gaining power over others through controlling important information and skills (p.118). But this practice proved inefficient due to regular retraining costs and the inability of cooperatives to gain increasing efficiency through specialization and long term skills development. It also proved very unsatisfactory for some employees who preferred to continue in certain occupations. Iannello's model resolves this problem by delegating regular tasks to specific members, but keeping important information, skills, and decisions under the control of all members equally.

 

What Are Critical Issues?

Most people in contemporary hierarchical societies have little or no influence over the critical issues affecting their lives and therefore they have no control over their own destiny. This lack of control or powerlessness destroys their well-being in emotional, mental, and physical ways. We noted the severity of this damage in chapter 8.

 

Every community and every organization will have to grant the freedom to its members to decide which issues in their particular situation should be classified as critical or mundane, but we would suggest that some of the more critical issues affecting citizens at the local, regional and national level would include employment security, affordable housing, taxation, government spending decisions, interest rates, currency evaluation, health and social services, recreational opportunities, environmental issues, and the overall economic performance of their state. These are some of the issues that impact massively on the lives of average people and yet they are issues controlled mainly by small elites far away in central governments or corporate headquarters.

 

At the organizational level, critical issues might include the hiring and placement of managers, all decision making processes that impact on organizational members, the monitoring/evaluation function with its subsequent rewards/punishment response, and various organizational benefits and opportunities.

 

Within any particular organization it should be up to all members to decide what issues in their particular situation should be classified as critical or mundane.

 

If loss of control has such devastating negative impacts on human life, then citizens must demand more control over such critical issues affecting their lives and destinies. It should be considered a basic human right to possess basic human well-being. The UN and all governments should be pressed to add to their definition of basic human rights the granting to their citizens of the control over critical decisions that is required to maintain basic levels of human well-being.

 

Consensus Supports Freedom And Personal Control

The process of consensual decision making outlined above mirrors the freedom that was the initial basis of emerging human consciousness. That freedom was a pause to reflect and question authority before choosing action. It was a break from dominating external control and it initiated the emergence of the process of people taking responsible control of their own behavior. Consensus decision making allows this freedom for all people involved in a given project or process to take more control. In this manner it allows for and supports the continued emergence of more human forms of existence and relating.

 

Iannello agrees with other studies on the damaging effect hierarchy has on human well-being. She explains the damaging cost of hierarchy in terms of damage to human potential: including loss of worker satisfaction due to low status and lack of control over decision making.

 

The goal of consensual decision making, says Iannello, is de-alienation through the humanizing of the workplace. This is accomplished through reduction of hierarchy. Part of the means to attaining this goal is true empowerment of people at the bottom of hierarchical organizations. Iannello explains that power is associated with the notion of controlling others. Empowerment is associated with the notion of controlling oneself.

 

As evaluation and monitoring are essential functions in controlling people in organizations, it is also important that these basic functions come under the full control of those at the bottom levels of the organizational hierarchy. In organizations based on empowerment, members monitor themselves.

 

Evaluation must not be an elite or management tool used to give or take benefits from people in the lower strata of organizations. It must not be used to threaten inferiors with loss. Such use of evaluation destroys morale and productivity. Threat through evaluation may appear to work in the short term, but over the long term it undermines morale and support for programs.

 

Also, the issue needs to be raised as to why managers and their performance are not evaluated in the same manner as lower strata workers? You rarely see upper level people punished and suffering for the same mistakes made by lower strata people. In saying this, we are not arguing that anyone should be punished.

 

We are including models such as Iannello's to show that more human forms of cooperation and relating are not only possible but are also very practical, workable, and efficient. Iannello includes detailed case studies in her book. There are enough successful models to show that horizontally oriented organizations can work, and work very well. There is no excuse for continuing with vertical structures that cause such immense damage to human well-being.

 

 From the series 'Taking The Vertical Out Of God'
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