Organizational dysfunction
20 Feb 2024 05:13 pmThe academic field that I abandoned after a couple of years all those ages ago, without writing a bachelor's thesis, was sociology. In recent years, when it occurred to me to potentially (someday) finish the degree now that it's easier to study at a distance, I've started occasionally gnawing away at what (sub)fields there are of interest to me, if any.
And also lately I've been occasionally thinking about organizational culture. With all the discussions swirling around problems with the OTW in recent years and the mental comparisons I've inevitably made to the volunteers and committees related to the Unitarian Universalist congregation I grew up in, I've always wondered if science (but it might be more likely to be psychology than sociology?) has something to tell us about the dynamics of volunteer organizations and why it is that they seem to be so similarly prone to the same kinds of failings. I tried to google the idea a bit, and it seems the concept of organizational culture has pretty much been taken over from sociology by business schools in recent years, and yuck, but also I'm specifically thinking about volunteer organizations here anyway. I know there is a body of research on charities and the problems that arise as they scale up, which is also interesting but maybe not exactly what I'm thinking about.
There was a recent national scandal in the Finnish Red Cross (up on the west coast of Finland some way away from here) to do with a boss who turned out to have been abusive for a long time to a whole bunch of employees, and it hasn't really led to a thorough reckoning or even a complete investigation by a third party, although people have been fired and resigned. This is nothing ESPECIALLY shocking; big charities have scandals like this with some regularity, and this isn't even nearly as bad as some of the international Red Cross scandals I remember in my adult life. I suppose this probably is dealt with in the research on the problems with big charities that I mentioned. The Finnish Red Cross, at the national level, has a high degree of transparency and a lot of regulations and checks and things, but perhaps these regulations are more complete and more useful in terms of the volunteers, members, and leadership, and less so in terms of the stuff that's staffed by employees?
And this Hugo disaster now is just absolutely flabbergasting. The fact that it now looks like the genre's hugely prestigious literary awards were made fraudulent for the whole year mostly at the instigation of one volunteer Western bad actor probably prompted in large part by ignorant racism?, assisted willingly by a bunch more Western volunteers who didn't sound the alarm at the time even though we hear that more than one was uncomfortable - the fact that it was apparently not even difficult for this to happen with the active efforts of what looks like perhaps quite a small group of people, possibly without any input from Chinese participants... it's bizarre in multiple ways, frankly, but one of the most amazing things is the level of institutional failure implied. I know the Hugos and Worldcon are run by small volunteer committees and that we're not talking about a huge number of people involved in planning. But at the same time, they're an institution that operates at the scale of Worldcon, with a huge community that they represent. The inevitable conclusion that they've been running like this all along, apparently held together with chewing gum and string, with most of the participants passively nodding along even to something as absolutely crazy as this...! That there are no built in checks or balances with enough robustness to ensure that someone with the ability to go "Wait just a goddamn minute here" is going to see what's happening before it happens! And that someone can coast into such a key position even if they're known by a bunch of people around the community after multiple reports to multiple conventions to be a serial sexual harrasser! It's a stunning indictment.
And also lately I've been occasionally thinking about organizational culture. With all the discussions swirling around problems with the OTW in recent years and the mental comparisons I've inevitably made to the volunteers and committees related to the Unitarian Universalist congregation I grew up in, I've always wondered if science (but it might be more likely to be psychology than sociology?) has something to tell us about the dynamics of volunteer organizations and why it is that they seem to be so similarly prone to the same kinds of failings. I tried to google the idea a bit, and it seems the concept of organizational culture has pretty much been taken over from sociology by business schools in recent years, and yuck, but also I'm specifically thinking about volunteer organizations here anyway. I know there is a body of research on charities and the problems that arise as they scale up, which is also interesting but maybe not exactly what I'm thinking about.
There was a recent national scandal in the Finnish Red Cross (up on the west coast of Finland some way away from here) to do with a boss who turned out to have been abusive for a long time to a whole bunch of employees, and it hasn't really led to a thorough reckoning or even a complete investigation by a third party, although people have been fired and resigned. This is nothing ESPECIALLY shocking; big charities have scandals like this with some regularity, and this isn't even nearly as bad as some of the international Red Cross scandals I remember in my adult life. I suppose this probably is dealt with in the research on the problems with big charities that I mentioned. The Finnish Red Cross, at the national level, has a high degree of transparency and a lot of regulations and checks and things, but perhaps these regulations are more complete and more useful in terms of the volunteers, members, and leadership, and less so in terms of the stuff that's staffed by employees?
And this Hugo disaster now is just absolutely flabbergasting. The fact that it now looks like the genre's hugely prestigious literary awards were made fraudulent for the whole year mostly at the instigation of one volunteer Western bad actor probably prompted in large part by ignorant racism?, assisted willingly by a bunch more Western volunteers who didn't sound the alarm at the time even though we hear that more than one was uncomfortable - the fact that it was apparently not even difficult for this to happen with the active efforts of what looks like perhaps quite a small group of people, possibly without any input from Chinese participants... it's bizarre in multiple ways, frankly, but one of the most amazing things is the level of institutional failure implied. I know the Hugos and Worldcon are run by small volunteer committees and that we're not talking about a huge number of people involved in planning. But at the same time, they're an institution that operates at the scale of Worldcon, with a huge community that they represent. The inevitable conclusion that they've been running like this all along, apparently held together with chewing gum and string, with most of the participants passively nodding along even to something as absolutely crazy as this...! That there are no built in checks or balances with enough robustness to ensure that someone with the ability to go "Wait just a goddamn minute here" is going to see what's happening before it happens! And that someone can coast into such a key position even if they're known by a bunch of people around the community after multiple reports to multiple conventions to be a serial sexual harrasser! It's a stunning indictment.