With the last posting of this blog, I began what will be a
series of postings which presents a set of functions that every organization
needs to satisfy in order to be a federalist organization or an
association. That posting focused on the
function of producing; an organization, be it a business, a family, a church, a
social group, or an athletic enterprise, has, to some minimum level, produce
the goods, service, and/or environment it was formed to produce. A car company has to produce cars; a
nightclub has to produce an entertaining environment and so on. Of all the functions, this is probably the most
straightforward. But it is not enough to
just produce that thing; an organization has to meet other functions.
Samuel P. Huntington,[1] among
many social scientists, developed a list of these functions. His list is adaptability, complexity,
autonomy, and coherence. As promised,
using Huntington’s list, I want to suggest a list of such functions that might
be useful to guide an educator in teaching civics and government. The guidance is geared to steering students’
attention to relevant issues associated with the creation and maintenance of
federalist unions – associations of individuals who allow themselves to be federated. Federated memberships are characterized by a
common commitment toward federalist values or moral code. As I have written before in a previous
posting:
The proposed code [of
liberated federalism] not only holds a particular value as a trump value, but
also presents a hierarchy of values. There are three levels of values: trump
value, key instrumental values, and operational values. Here is a list of these
values:
•
Trump Value: Societal welfare (as experienced through societal
survival and/or advancement)
•
Key Instrumental Values: constitutional integrity (liberty),
equality, communal democracy, democratic pluralism and diversity, compacted
arrangements, critical and transparent deliberation, collective
problem-solving, earned trust, loyalty, patriotism (in the case of a national
federated union), expertise
•
Operational Values (partial listing): political engagement, due
process, legitimate authority, privacy, universality of human rights,
tolerance, non-violence, teamwork, consideration of others, economic
sufficiency, security, localism
As can be noted, lower
level values are logically derived from higher level values. These values,
other than the trump value, are not presented as a definitive set of values,
but the code is fairly tied into the trump and instrumental values as central
to its theoretical base – federalist theory.
These values
are not unique to liberated federalism, but they, as a set, comprise what
federalists aspire to keep in the operation of their union with other members
of the group and with the outside world.
This posting
will now focus on a second function, that of accommodating change – adaptability. The world changes and all organizations or
groups have to meet those changes with modifications in what they do both in
terms of internal operations and how they act with others. This oftentimes means changes in not just
actions, but in how members of the group or organization feel. This can take time, and often the stress
which just about always accompanies these changes can be heightened if the
internal or external changes occur in a fast pace. Changes not only vary in terms of a time
factor, but also in terms of how intrusive they are. Both of these factors, time and seriousness,
have to be managed if the entity will satisfy the adaptability function. Probably the most significant example of an
issue associated with this function in the recent news has been our changes
regarding race relations as illustrated by the events of Ferguson, Missouri this
past year.
Here is a
list of questions that an educator can use to analyze a political or social situation
that addresses the adaptability function:
What are the
major prevailing values and biases of the people in a given group?
What
communal, regional, national, and/or global events have taken place that
promise to affect the group in question?
Has the
membership of the group gone through changes in its attitudes, values, and/or
biases either among all of its members or among key members?
Has the
membership of the group gone through a turnover due to unmet problems or due to
generational aging?
Has the need
for the group’s existence been satiated or its priority changed so that the
concern over its importance has either been heightened or diminished in such a
way that the group’s viability has come into question or its ability to perform
efficiently has been compromised?
Have the relations
between members grown inappropriately estranged or become too close so as to
create stress among those members directly affected and/or by others within the
group?
Are authority
arrangements clear and appropriate given the current challenges of the group?
Have the
members of the group effectively changed their skills and knowledge to meet
changing demands?
These
questions will also be pertinent in the consideration of other functions I will
review in a future posting. For now, let
me just state that some level of change is always on-going. This is ever truer as the society in which
the group exists becomes more complex and developed. It seems that in the post-Cold War era, one
of our biggest challenges on the global stage is to deal with societies that
seem to be stuck in a traditional, lesser developed mode of being. I think our problems in the Middle East have
a lot to do with this gap between modernism and traditional value
orientations. For example, many of our
assumptions that led to our invasion of Iraq have to do with poor adaptability on
our part in dealing with traditional mindsets and where strong authoritarian
regimes are either being challenged, as in Syria, or overthrown, as in Iraq. We seemed to think we could impose a modern
political polity on a people who were not able or willing to make the necessary
accommodations that our policy was calling for.
We have to be concerned not only with one’s own group’s ability to
adapt, but also that of others.
[1] Huntington, S. P.
(1968). Political order in changing societies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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