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The act of organizing: constitutive decisions

29 September, 2015 - 14:34

Variation three, O\rightarrow X+Y , refers to the act of organizing things in a certain way.

By organizing in particular ways, we create important parts of the circumstances within which future actions of all types take place. We thereby influence these future decisions. The act of organizing is thus a super wholesale approach to decision and action.

Organizations can be seen as collections of offices or roles, and roles in turn can be seen as sets of rules regarding proper and improper actions by the occupants of these roles. In this sense, also, the act of organizing can be regarded as a wholesale or indirect approach to rule-making and, thus, a super wholesale or doubly indirect approach to deciding how to act in specific cases.

The American Constitutional Convention of 1787 was one of history's most dramatic examples of acting to organize. It is thought to have greatly influenced on the subsequent course of events in America. Likewise, the decisions by Lenin and his associates regarding the pre-revolutionary organization of the Communist Party continued to have important consequences as the Soviet Union approached the end of the twentieth century, more than 70 years later. Actually, decisions about how to organize (and reorganize) are constantly going on at all levels of society, and in all kinds of contexts. While most such decisions are not as dramatic as the above examples, taken as a whole they are a very important part of the decisions and actions going on in the world.