I HAVE A DEAL FOR YOU

There is a lot to disagree with in the writings of Karl Marx, but his analysis of capitalism is fairly comprehensive and he does offer useful insights.  One is that in capitalism, as well as in any of the prevailing economic systems of past eras, the basic principles of that system will permeate all the institutions that make up the social infrastructure of a society.  Back in the middle ages, for example, the doctrines of the Catholic Church, which supported the feudalistic system, permeated all the institutions of European societies.  Today, the prevailing economic system is capitalism and we have a similar intrusion.  We see this in how different aspects of life have taken on the structure and processes of markets.

In terms of the concerns of this blog, the mental construct that promotes and supports this bias toward markets is the natural rights construct.  It is this construct that bolsters the idea and ideal that each of us as individuals can pursue those things we determine as valuable.  A worthy bias but one that, when radicalized, can be shortsighted and detrimental to legitimate communal interests.  A noted writer, Michael J. Sandel, looks into this ever increasing trend in our national social intercourse.

In his book, What Money Can’t Buy:  The Moral Limits of Markets, he reports on the questionable practices that have developed in this area.  Early in the book, he offers several examples of what some might consider inappropriate market offers; let me share a couple of these:

·        A prison cell upgrade:  $82 per night.  In Santa Ana, California, and some other cities, nonviolent offenders can pay for better accommodations – a clean, quiet jail cell, away from the cells for nonpaying prisoners. …

·        The services of an Indian surrogate mother to carry a pregnancy:  $6,250.  Western couples seeking surrogates increasingly outsource the job to India, where the practice is legal and the price is less than one-third the going rate in the United States.[1]

People have suggested paying students to do their assignments, and if you apply your imagination, you could probably come up with questionable and, in some cases, distasteful market exchanges.

This is a topic I want to revisit in the future.  In the meantime, let me ask you to keep your eyes and ears open to note such cases.  Overall, I would say that each questionable marketization of a product or service that falls beyond the limits we have had in place is a case which undermines certain degrees of obligation or other senses of sanctity in those areas we hold to be sacred or otherwise important.  When you can sell something, it becomes akin to a commodity.  We got rid of slavery, but are we ready to give up on other honored advantages?  As Sandel points out:  “Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone but increasingly governs the whole of life.  It is time to ask whether we want to live this way.”[2]

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[1] Sandel, M. J.  (2012).  What Money Can’t Buy:  The Moral Limits of Markets.  New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.  Citation on p. 3.

[2] Ibid., p. 6.

WILLING TO SUSPEND A QUESTIONING DISPOSITION

If I were to get my “druthers,” the nation would, in its civics classes, adopt the liberated federalist construct to guide the choices of content.  It would be a content filled with stories and issues that would have students engage in questions over how collectives, as opposed to individuals, make a difference in the formulation and implementation of public policy.  It would have students make valuations of public actions that affect the common welfare of the nation, as opposed to public policy that affects the private interests of individuals and/or factions.  It would certainly have students be offended by claims of ideologues who unquestionably accept versions of the truth, be it based on political, economic, and/or religious belief systems.  No; liberated federalism would strive to have students be of a critical disposition; more questioning than accepting, more dubious than accommodating – not in a disrespectful way, but in a loving or, at least, respectful way.  Given this, I believe Daniel C. Dennett[1] asks a very interesting and important question.

Let me share with you how he asks it:

I put it this way.  Suppose that we face some horrific, terrible enemy, another Hitler or something really, really bad, and here’s two different armies that we could use to defend ourselves.  I’ll call them the Gold Army and Silver Army:  same numbers, same training, same weaponry.  They’re all armored and armed as well as we can do.  The difference is that the Gold Army has been convinced that God is on their side and this is the cause of righteousness, and it’s as simple as that.  The Silver Army is entirely composed of economists.  They’re all making side insurance bets and calculating the odds of everything.

Which army do you want on the front lines?  It’s very hard to say you want the economists, but think of what that means.  What you’re saying is that we’ll just have to hoodwink all these young people into some false beliefs for their own protection and for ours.  It’s extremely hypocritical.

Wow!  I must say, when you put it that way, I take pause.  How critical do I want the next generation to be?  The concern entailed in Dennett’s question puts the basic premise of liberated federalism into a very uncomfortable light.

Of course, when Dennett mentions economists, he could as easily have said scientist or philosopher or political theorist or thinking citizen.  It could be anyone who is open to new information, to divergent arguments, to unorthodoxy.  It surely is not someone who buys into a view of final truth.  It is not someone who cannot distinguish between faith and knowledge where faith is that position between knowledge and ignorance.

I have a faith.  It is that we can encourage students to be skeptical yet motivated by a love for the common good so that he or she can be called on to sacrifice for the betterment of the commonwealth and be sufficiently obedient when the demands and the reality of a troubling time call for it.

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[1] Dennett, D. C.  (2013).  The normal well-tempered mind.  In John Brockman (Ed.) Thinking: The new science of decision-making, problem-solving, and prediction (pp. 1-17).  New York, NY:  Harper Perennial.  Citation on pp. 16-17.

A NEED FOR A MORAL TIME

As the years go by, the twentieth century is beginning to recede in our collective memories.  Yet the turns we collectively made during that century are still making their effects quite clearly felt every day.  None are more daunting than the attacks cast upon our moral traditions.  From the effects that the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche had to the rise of atheistic, totalitarian regimes to secularization of our political discourse, we no longer hold the Judeo-Christian tradition with the reverence we once ascribed to it.  I am not passing judgement here over any of these effects, events, or transitions, but I want to point out the gravity of this turn.  I would claim that for most of us, when it comes to moral questions, we don’t go first to religious sources to determine what we consider moral and what we consider immoral.  Yes, some of us do, but the majority of us take on a more practical view than a biblical one.  When one asks, for example, should I pay my employees a living wage or should I fluff off a legitimate demand of an employer or should I support public policy that insures health care for all our fellow citizens, these are questions that I see most people respond to from a self-interest point of view.  While for most, God might not be dead, His attributed admonishments about responsibilities concerning the fate of others have become just so much background noise.

I have in this blog argued that we, through most of our national history, transformed from a more theistic foundation – a Puritanical foundation – to a secular perspective.  The transformation was slow, but completed in the years after World War II.  It was in those years that the natural rights construct became our prevalent view of government and politics.  Here, the language of liberty took dominance.  With that bias, the focus became one promoting the notion that everyone was free to determine what beliefs and values one was to hold.  Historically, there was a bit of irony involved.  When one considers what all the twentieth century had already offered up, one would think that certain moral commitments should have taken hold.  Let’s get a sense of this situation; Jonathan Glover[1] writes:

The problems have come from events, the twentieth-century history of large-scale cruelty and killing is only too familiar; the mutual slaughter of the First World War, the terror-famine of the Ukraine, the Gulag, Auschwitz, Dresden, the Burma Railway, the Hiroshima, Vietnam, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Cambodia, Rwanda, the collapse of Yugoslavia.  These names will conjure up others.  Because of this history, it is (or should be) hard for thinking about ethics to carry on just as before.[2]

Has our rejection of religious based morality, to the degree it has happened, been a reaction to this history of misery and destruction?

I don’t have any great insight.  My only observation is that our civics curriculum that has adopted a natural rights perspective to guide its content and led to an abandonment of any systemic moral education cannot be anymore ill advised.  We cannot go back to the Puritanical days; we are too materialistic, too diverse.  But we can study moral questions.  Unlike Nietzsche, I don’t look at our Judeo-Christian tradition as a sign of weakness or a lack of will; I see it as the height of practicality.  I also see it as very much in sync with the basic moral claims of all the major religious traditions.  I saw an interesting film recently.  Focus is a film that illustrates how con artists work.  The basic technique to steal your money is to divert your attention.  There is a series of scenes in which a small army of pick- pockets and other con men and women make hay during Super Bowl week at the site of the big game.  What I took away was that you cannot beat them by thinking all you need to do is be conscious of where your valuables are.  You need to avoid such places or attend but put an empty wallet in your back pocket – perhaps with a note inside saying, “not here.”  Similarly, morality is a way to avoid the great problems in life, especially in one’s dealings with others.  Moral behavior in our social interactions tempers the motivations of others to do us harm.  One might have something someone else wants to take, but if you treat people right, at least you are providing some discouragement toward others taking advantage of you.  More positively, you can very well encourage conditions of coordination and cooperation.  It can lead to our federating ourselves with others.

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[1] Glover, J.  (1999).  Humanity:  A moral history of the twentieth century.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.

[2] Ibid., p. 2.

REQUISITE FUNCTIONS OF FEDERATED GROUPS

I have, with the last series of postings of this blog, offered a list of functions I believe a group, organization, association, or institution needs to meet in order for it to establish and maintain itself as a federated collective.  If you have not read these postings, I encourage you to go back to the posting entitled The Need to Produce and the five postings that follow it.  With that posting, I began to describe the five functions that lead to federated groups:  producing, adapting, sophisticating, liberating, coordinating, and maintaining.  Below, I describe each one and with each, I list questions an educator can ask of a collective to have students analyze how federated that collective is, how well its membership is federated among its members, and how well it pursues federal values.

Before providing these descriptions, let me clear up a few issues.  First, the questions I provide are not necessarily meant to be the exact questions a teacher or educational material writer should use.  Such an educator needs to take into account the students’ levels of sophistication, their ability to think abstractly, and their motivation.  But then again, these are concerns educators should always keep in mind.  Second, the questions should be viewed as areas of concern, as suggestions to the type of subject areas a lesson should pursue and that students can investigate.  Often, the questions ask about information that might not be readily available.  Therefore, time becomes a factor – how much time does a teacher want to expend on any one subject area?  Third, I use the participle form in titling these functions for a reason.  I want to communicate action; functions are met through activities, not planning or issuing pronouncements.  I therefore chose terms such as “producing” to indicate this fact.  With those qualifiers in mind, let’s look at the meaning of each function.

Producing – 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 its members to establish it.  I call this function the producing function.  As with any production, certain activities have to be accomplished.  These include securing the physical and human resources necessary to carry out the production process.

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 was 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?

Adapting – 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 often means changes in not only actions, but also 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 at a fast pace.  Changes vary not only 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 adapting function.

Here is a list of questions that an educator can use to analyze a political or social situation that addresses the adapting 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?

How well can a group’s policy-makers determine what is true?

How realistic are a group’s espoused views of reality?

How much are a group’s espoused theories in accordance to the group’s theory-in-use – the rationale for actual activities?

To the degree a group’s espoused theories are in conflict with their theory-in-use, what level of tension is created within the group and how well do they manage this tension?

What happens to the group’s ability to adapt if the chasm between espoused theories and theory-in-use is of a meaningful level?

Sophisticating – A collective needs to sufficiently complicate its operations as its mission changes over time.  Reality offers complications or a group, in order to take on more ambitious aims, needs to meet any resulting complications it faces.  This is in terms of its structures and processes.  Why:  so as to be able to act in a sufficiently sophisticated fashion to meet its survival needs and perform in such a way to successfully attain its goals and aims. 

Questions an educator could use to analyze the sophisticating function are:

Is the group’s structure complicated enough to accomplish its mission?

Are the processes practiced by a group complicated enough to accomplish its mission?

Is the environment of the group becoming more complicated?  If so, at what pace?

Does the group have the values that either conflict or accommodate complications?

Do the attempts by a group to become more sophisticated cause disruptive tensions between members of the group or with those people with whom the group interacts?

Liberating – I use this term liberating with reservations; I don’t want to communicate that a federated group does whatever it wants or has the power to do so.  But it needs enough liberty to be able to be distinguished from other groups; that is, it needs enough autonomy.  Without this autonomy, a group is merely a social gathering of people who get together by happenstance or for limited reasons – so limited that no one cares if the reasons are satisfied or not.  But for a group pursuing any more substance, it has to have enough authority, integrity, legitimacy, and the ability to set options and be able to choose independently which options it wants to pursue in its drive to be viable.  In order to do this, it has to be conscious of its environment and be able to establish its borders, be able to patrol those borders, and be able to meet any challenges other groups might use to thwart its liberty.  For some groups, this includes competition with other groups, especially if the group needs or wants limited resources that are needed or wanted by other groups – a condition endemic among political groups.  There is also the challenge of a group that is organizationally situated within a larger group, for example an individual school within a school district.

In studying political or governmental groups, teachers can use the following questions when considering this function:

Does the group have a clear sense of what it is?  Does it have a formal organizational mission and philosophy?

Does the group have processes in place with supporting structural elements to review its policies, strategies, and operations to see whether they are reflections of the group’s guiding ideals?

Is the group respected by other entities?

Is the group suitably prepared and equipped to meet challenges from environmental forces whether they be social or natural in origin?

Are the limits of the group’s authority clear to the policy makers within the group and to members of other groups?

What sources of power are available to the group; that is, does the group have the ability to administer coercion, rewards, or legitimacy toward other entities?

Coordinating – Since my functions are aimed at promoting successful federated groups, my choice of coordinating, as opposed to organizing, hopefully denotes a higher degree of interactivity between members, an interactivity that has a level of esprit and unity not captured by the term organizing.  Hence, I chose coordinating in the hope that it more closely describes a sense of partnership which is what a federation is.  Not only does such a group have a formal structure as exists in organizations, but an emotional commitment that exudes palpable loyalty.  This level of cohesion does not necessarily depend on friendship, although friendship could be helpful, but it does demand respect for each other – a respect of each member’s humanity and his or her role within the group.  If this function is met, a whole array of activities will not only be tolerated, but also be sought after.  Discussions and disagreements are seen as opportunities for improvement, not triggers for dissolution or other counterproductive actions.  In order for this to work, a federated group has to have a significant amount of trust among the membership.  This latter quality is not easily attained and it shouldn’t be.  Trust in a federated group should be seen as something that needs to be earned and not taken for granted – although at times it needs to be assumed.

A teacher who wants his/her students to study a group and determine whether the group is meeting this function of coordinating might ask some or all of the following questions:

Does the group have clear lines of authority?

Does the group have a sufficient array of skills among its members to viably engage in activities that are meant to accomplish its purposes?

Does the group have problem-solving protocols that meet the challenges of the group’s internal and external environment?

Does the group encourage broad participation among its members in the established problem-solving protocols?

Do the members have a clear understanding of their individual roles and expectations?  Do they individually and collectively judge these roles and expectations as legitimate and proper?

Maintaining – The focus of this function is dedicated toward keeping that which exists, a collective’s basic elements.  This bias is particularly true when it comes to basic values which determine a group’s structure, processes and, most important, ideals.  As such, there are two main processes in which the maintaining function is satisfied:  recruitment and socialization.

A teacher who wants students to analyze a group’s performance regarding the function, maintaining, might ask the following questions:

By which process are new members to the group identified and allowed into the group?

Does the group evaluate the performance of its members to hold up its basic commitments and take steps to shore up any deficiencies stemming from poor performances?

Are effective processes in place that accommodate unanticipated turnover in group membership?

Are members taught those elements of skill, knowledge, attitudes, and values central to the foundation of the group?  Is the group effective in teaching those elements?

Are members effectively encouraged to support the group’s basic values, beliefs, and commitments?

As with the other functions, these suggested questions are not meant to be an exhaustive list. 

With this review finished, this blog will go on to other concerns; hopefully these functions will prove to be helpful in studying collectives either from our current political landscape or from historical cases.

MAINTAINING

This posting is the last of a series of postings in which I am presenting a set of functions a group needs to fulfill in order for it to be a federated group.[1]  A federated group is a group that is made up of individuals or groups that come together and formulate a collective to accomplish stated purposes and to be united under the provisions of a covenant or compact.  For such a group to be viable and able to overcome obstacles that stand in its way, the group needs to meet certain functions.  I have, to date, identified four such functions:  producing, adapting, sophisticating, and liberating.  These first four functions were derived from the concerns expressed by Samuel P. Huntington;[2] the fifth function, which I am presenting in this posting, stems from my interest in civics.  The reason that civics is essential to our nation, our political system – a federated group – pertains to this function I am calling maintaining.

This fifth function is a concern that takes a group in a different direction from those of the other four functions.  The first four functions tend to point a group toward change.  Whether the effort is toward producing or becoming more sophisticated or seeking autonomy (liberating), the group dedicates energy toward looking for different ways of doing things, toward change.  But in the case of maintaining, the focus is dedicated toward keeping that which exists.  This bias is particularly true when it comes to basic values which determine a group’s structure, processes and, most important, ideals.  As such, there are two main processes in which the maintaining function is satisfied:  recruitment and socialization.

In order to maintain those key elements of a group, a group needs to have the right people in the right positions.  It needs these people to have the skills – both technical and social – knowledge, motivations, and energy to accomplish the roles the position demands.  Of course, this presupposes that the group has met the sophisticating function sufficiently well so that the appropriate roles have been identified and the structural elements have been put in place to begin with.  But given that this has been done, then a group needs the right type of person to fill the position.

The other process is socialization.  Here is where civics is so important.  A federated group needs to teach and promote those elements of knowledge, skills, attitudes, values, and commitment that support the basic values of the group – values that are reflected in its founding covenant or compact.  This can be tricky in that federated groups will most likely be committed to progressing toward more equality and liberty.  Given the nature of social life, as social conditions change in a group’s environment, a group will be challenged to adapt to new demands.  Through these changes, a group will be tempted to change its basic commitments.  This makes it imperative to value, as a basic value, change itself, but without selling out and changing its founding values.  One can change, but one should not sacrifice who one is and this extends to groups.  If the demand is to make such a change, then it might be time for the group to terminate.

A teacher who wants students to analyze a group’s performance regarding the function, maintaining, might ask the following questions:

By which process are new members to the group identified and allowed into the group?

Does the group evaluate the performance of its members to hold up its basic commitments and take steps to shore up any deficiencies stemming from poor performances?

Are effective processes in place that accommodate unanticipated turnover in group membership?

Are members taught those elements of skill, knowledge, attitudes, and values central to the foundation of the group?  Is the group effective in teaching those elements?

Are members effectively encouraged to support the group’s basic values, beliefs, and commitments?

As with the other functions, these suggested questions are not meant to be an exhaustive list.  The reasons for such a study will probably determine what specific questions an educator will ask.

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[1] I will in my next posting summarize the functions and reprint the questions associated with each function.

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

COORDINATING

After a bit of a debate with myself, I am calling this next function coordinating.  The context of this debate is that I am in the midst of presenting through a set of postings a list of functions that I believe are useful to educators who want students to look at political activity from the perspective of groups.  Groups are, of course, collections of individuals who come together for a purpose.  Groups vary in importance, duration, formality, cohesiveness, and purpose.  All groups also vary in the matter of their health – how likely they are to be viable and to overcome any existing forces that might present the group obstacles or, even more ominous, dangers.  Experience tells us that any group we might have belonged to was concerned with these forces.  Take the experience that belonging to a family provides.

Over the years, families face many negative situations:  losing a job, being uprooted due to work or family challenges, partaking in infidelity, rebelling children, on and on.  We are told that most divorces are caused by financial problems.  In addition, our defining marriage as a contract as opposed to a covenant or compact has added to the disruptive forces facing families.  In order for a family to be viable, to be healthy, it needs to do certain things and if we analyze across groups, we can identify a list of activity types, functional behaviors, which increase the likelihood of a group succeeding. 

My list is a set of functions that political groups need to fulfill to some degree in order to be healthy.  Given that just about all groups have a political function, we can extend these functions beyond those groups whose primary reason for existence is political.  The other proviso is to point out that my list applies to a range of groups from those who are highly informal to those that are institutionalized and integral to our political landscape.[1]  My last few postings have identified the following functions:  producing, adapting, sophisticating, and liberating.  This posting will describe the function, coordinating.

I also debated about whether to call this function organizing or coordinating.  Since my functions are aimed at promoting successful federated groups, my choice of coordinating hopefully denotes a higher degree of interactivity between members, an interactivity that has a level of esprit and unity not captured by the term organizing.  Hence, I chose coordinating in the hope that it more closely describes a sense of partnership which is what a federation is.  Not only does such a group have a formal structure as exists in organizations, but an emotional commitment that exudes palpable loyalty.  This level of cohesion does not necessarily depend on friendship, although friendship could be helpful, but it does demand respect for each other – a respect of each member’s humanity and his or her role within the group.  If this function is met, a whole array of activities will not only be tolerated, but also be sought after.  Discussions and disagreements are seen as opportunities for improvement, not triggers for dissolution or other counterproductive actions.  In order for this to work, a federated group has to have a significant amount of trust among the membership.  This latter quality is not easily attained and it shouldn’t be.  Trust in a federated group should be seen as something that needs to be earned and not taken for granted – although at times it needs to be assumed.

All of this, of course, does not preclude the needs of all organizations.  Federated associations need a formal structure, well-defined authority relations, and all the physical resources necessary to fulfill their purposes.  But a difference that distinguishes federated associations is the bias they have for more horizontal power arrangements.  This feature is not born from trying to be trendy, but from a sincere attachment to an ideal of having each member contribute to the policy-making processes of the group.  Of course, this desire needs to be tempered by practical concerns, which includes needs for expertise and other technical and physical requirements.  But it does require that all of its, at least, participating members believe in and interpret sufficiently similarly the foundational ideals and principles of the group.

A teacher who wants his/her students to study a group and determine whether the group is meeting this function of coordinating might ask some or all of the following questions:

Does the group have clear lines of authority?

Does the group have a sufficient array of skills among its members to viably engage in activities that are meant to accomplish its purposes?

Does the group have problem-solving protocols that meet the challenges of the group’s internal and external environment?

Does the group encourage broad participation among its members in the established problem-solving protocols?

Do the members have a clear understanding of their individual roles and expectations?  Do they individually and collectively judge these roles and expectations as legitimate and proper?

Can you add to this list?

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[1] I see groups ranging from haphazard gatherings to very important and essential collections of important people.  The progression goes something like this:  gathering, group, organization, association, institution.  An association is an organization that is made up of federated individuals or groups.  I don’t particularly like the term institution.  I like to reserve that term to identify established ways of doing things.  Since institutions – as I am defining them – rely on very healthy groups, the term institution – as a group – can be used reservedly.

LIBERATING

This posting is one of a series which presents a set of functions that a group, which might be at any level of institutionalization, needs to satisfy in order to be a federated collective of people or subgroups.  Prior to this entry, I have presented three functions:  producing, adapting, and sophisticating.  I now turn my attention to a fourth function, that of liberating.  My efforts are motivated by the goal to have civics teachers approach the study of government and politics from the perspective of collectives.  This, in turn, is based on the assumption that meaningful accomplishments in those realms of human endeavors are done by groups, organizations, associations, or institutions.  Individuals are important, but they are important as members of groups.  They have roles and there are the expectations that these roles are performed to varying levels of proficiency.  But the often misleading habit is to zero in on individuals and this gives the student an inaccurate picture of how politics works and functions.  A way to approach a study of government or politics from the perspective of groups is to analyze a group’s ability to meet essential functions.[1]

I use this term liberating with reservations; I don’t want to communicate that a federated group does whatever it wants or has the power to do so.  But it needs enough liberty to be able to be distinguished from other groups; that is, it has enough autonomy.  Without this autonomy, a group is merely a social gathering of people who get together by happenstance or for limited reasons – so limited that no one cares if the reasons are satisfied or not.  But for a group pursuing any more substance, it has to have enough authority, integrity, legitimacy, and the ability to set options and be able to choose independently which options it wants to pursue in its drive to be viable.  In order to do this, it has to be conscious of its environment and be able to establish its borders, be able to patrol those borders, and be able to meet any challenges other groups might use to thwart its liberty.  For some groups, this includes competition with other groups, especially if the group needs or wants limited resources that are needed or wanted by other groups – a condition endemic among political groups.  There is also the challenge of a group that is organizationally situated within a larger group, for example an individual school within a school district.  What is the appropriate level of liberty an individual school should have in running its affairs?  Policy determines this and policy makers who want groups to be successful need to give these liberating concerns a lot of thought.

Let me use this latter concern to illustrate what a group has to consider in meeting this function of liberating.  I worked in a high school in a large school district, Miami-Dade Public School District.  The district’s policy not only had “downtown” name each school’s principal but each of its assistant principals as well.  The consequence is that the principal – and therefore the school – was denied a very important option.  As an organization, this lack of authority interferes very seriously with the school settling in on an operational philosophy.  Without a single philosophy, the school cannot have anything resembling a curriculum toward which teachers can gear their efforts.  Students go from class to class with each class having a different view of what schooling is all about, what expectations will be kept, or what constitutes success.  I don’t want to give the impression that schools are unreasonably chaotic, but in some very important ways, they do not exemplify smooth running operations with clear senses of their missions.

In studying political or governmental groups, teachers can use the following questions when considering this function:

Does the group have a clear sense of what it is?  Does it have a formal organizational mission and philosophy?

Does the group have processes in place with supporting structural elements to review its policies, strategies, and operations to see whether they are reflections of the group’s guiding ideals?

Is the group respected by other entities?

Is the group suitably prepared and equipped to meet challenges from environmental forces whether they be social or natural in origin?

Are the limits of the group’s authority clear to the policy makers within the group and to members of other groups?

What sources of power are available to the group; that is, does the group have the ability to administer coercion, rewards, or legitimacy toward other entities?

As with the other functions, one can probably think of other questions, but these can start a study of liberating.

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[1]  This series of postings is highly influenced by the work of Samuel P. Huntington.  See Huntington, S. P.  (1968).  Political order in changing societies.  New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press.