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.