CHANGING TIMES

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.

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[1] Huntington, S. P.  (1968).  Political order in changing societies.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

THE NEED TO PRODUCE

On January 14, 2011, I posted “Requisite Functions” on this blog.  It reviewed a model of politics known as the structural-functional model by Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr.  In a nutshell, the model claims that in order for political systems to deal with stress and lead a healthy existence, it needs to act in such a way that certain functions are met.  They identified five functions:  rule making, rule application, rule adjudication, interest articulation, and interest aggregation.  Since the Almond and Powell model was published, there has been a slew of “function” models, each with its own set of functions and all claiming that it is imperative for systems to meet these requisites and that to the extent that they don’t, they will face stress even to the point that their very existences can come into question.  My take is that these models are useful and the exact list of functions one wants to use is dependent on the aims an analyst or student has in his/her study.  If one is an educator charged with teaching secondary students the nature and workings of our political and governmental realities, is a functional approach helpful?  Does it guide that educator to ask insightful questions that students can use to study their political and governmental world?

Of course, this blog adds another concern:  is there a list of functions that reflects a concern for federalist systems?  Is there a set of questions that has students analyze a group, be it a social group, an organization, an association, or an institution, as to whether that entity encourages and/or expects its membership to federate among themselves and pursue federalist values?  I want to suggest such a list of questions, beginning with this posting and continuing in the postings that follow.  In this effort, I want to use the ideas expressed by Samuel P. Huntington.[1]

Central to Huntington’s concern is how viable political systems are dependent on how well the various systems under their jurisdiction develop into institutions.  Viable political systems and the societies they represent need stable institutions.  Huntington writes: 

Political community in a complex society thus depends upon the strength of the political organizations and procedures in the society. … Institutionalization is the process by which organizations and procedures acquire value and stability.  The level of institutionalization of any political system can be defined by the adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence of its organizations and procedures.[2]

And with this, Huntington offers his own set of functions.  While I will use this list of functions as overall concerns that my list will address, I will change the terminology so that classrooms will find it more adaptable to their needs.

This posting will focus on a function that is not directly identified by Huntington, but is alluded to as he describes the above list of functions, particularly adaptability.  I believe the most basic of all functions is that a social group or organization needs to produce the good, service, or environment it is created to produce.  For example, a government is created for many reasons; among them is to maintain social stability – a society can’t have havoc and chaos breaking out.  Any social/political system has, to some degree, to fulfill those aims and goals that motivated people to form that social entity.  I call this function the producing function.  As with any production, certain activities have to be accomplished.

These activities lead to questions as to whether they are/were done and to what level of viability they are/were done.  These questions can include the following:

Has the entity identified and defined the product it is created to produce?

Has the entity acquired or secured the resources needed to produce the product(s) it was set up to produce?

Is the process of production a viable use of resources?

Does the entity use the resources in a reasonably efficient mode?

Is the process of production effective?

Is the product distributed in a way that meets the aims and goals of the entity?

Are the recipients of the product sufficiently satisfied with the quality, viability, and efficiency of the product?  Do they have a method of evaluating the product and the ability to communicate their judgment of the product to those who are responsible for it and to other interested parties?

Are there in place evaluation protocols over any of the above concerns and ways to communicate the results of these evaluations?

These questions can be used by students to investigate any political organization.  That would include their own schools that, like or not, are political entities.  In the case of public schools, they engage in providing a governmental service and, as such, have to answer the concerns of a constituency:  the community they serve, particularly the parents of the students who attend them.  But here’s another idea:  have students pick one of the formulating presidential campaign organizations that we hear about; for example, Rand Paul’s people.  These organizations’ aim is to elect a particular candidate to the presidency.  That is what they want to produce.  Note:  a teacher need not use all of the above questions and they can be geared to the appropriate level of sophistication that is suitable for the students in question.

In the following postings, I will add additional functions and the questions I associate with each.  The producing function is probably the most basic of these functions and assignments limited to just this function are sufficient to lead students to discover a great deal about a political or governmental entity, be it a political campaign, a part of the government (like their school), or any other politically active entity.

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[1] Huntington, S. P.  (1968).  Political order in changing societies.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

[2] Ibid., p. 12.