John Robb offers an interesting challenge to the ideas that David Ronfeldt developed in his work on the evolutionary governance of societies.
To summarize David’s scheme on Tribes, Institutions, Markets, and Networks:
“What forms account for the organization of societies? How have people organized their societies across the ages?
The answer may be reduced to four basic forms of organization:
1. the kinship-based tribe, as denoted by the structure of extended families, clans, and other lineage systems.
2. the hierarchical institution, as exemplified by the army, the (Catholic) church, and ultimately the bureaucratic state.
3. competitive-exchange market, as symbolized by merchants and traders responding to forces of supply and demand.
4. and the collaborative network, as found today in the web-like ties among some NGOs devoted to social advocacy.”
(the full paper is at http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/2005/P7967.pdf)
David offers the following evolutionary pathway:
“Societies that can elevate the bright over the dark side of each form and achieve a new combination become more powerful and capable of complex tasks than societies that do not. Societies that first succeed at making a new combination gain advantages over competitors and attain a paramount influence over the nature of international conflict and cooperation.”
And here’s John Robb’s challenge to it:
“This model is very useful for analysis of our current situation. However, there are a couple twists that may make its application problematic. Here’s a critique:
* If the crisis is too severe, it can force society backwards into tribal or TI (tribal plus institutional) structures. Neo-feudalism and totalitarian states.
* This model assumes that countries, defined as discrete bordered geographies, are the only container within which these organizational forms exist. It’s possible that the elevation of markets to a global level, beyond the nation-state or country container, has left nation-states vulnerable to predation. In that globalized system, market participants (who define themselves solely within context) prey on organizationally weak nation-states (T plus I).
* Global markets are supercharging tribal, institutional (corporate), and networked organizational types. As a result, they are likely to prey upon nation-states too.”
Amongst the interesting comments, David Ronfeldt himself points to the relationship between these governance forms and the underlying technologies:
“The rise of the tribal form depended on a symbolic revolution — the emergence of language and early writing — which enabled the storytelling that is central to tribal cultures. The rise of the institutional form — as in the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, the absolutist states, and their vast administrative structures — involved a mechanical revolution: the development of formal writing and printing, first penned script and later the printing press. Writing was important not only for keeping records and issuing commands, but also for inscribing laws that chiefdoms and states wanted to apply to growing populations who were not kin and, generally, not known well to each other. Next, the rise of the market form and its far-flung business enterprises was enabled by the electrical technologies of the 19th century: the telegraph, telephone, and radio. Today’s rise of the network form extends from the digital revolution and its technologies, notably the Internet, fax machines, and cellular telephony, which are especially empowering civil-society actors around the world and across political spectrums. Each new technology altered and abetted the forms (and technologies) that preceded it. “
One reader, Christian Solberg, refers to the relational grammar of Alan Page Fiske, which is the framework I’m using in P2P Theory:
“Mr. Ronfeldt, if you don’t already know it, I suggest you have a look at the work of anthropologist Alan Page Fiske, who has developed a four-fold typology of social relations that is in many respects similar to yours. His model has Communalism for your Tribes, Hierarchy for your Institutions, Equality Matching (eg. tit-for-tat & turn-taking) for your Networks and Market Pricing for your Markets. A difference is that he relates his model as much to individual-level cognitive differences as to social or structural-level differences in organisation.”
To which Ronfeldt responds:
“I’m familiar with Fiske’s framework. As I wrote in my 2006 paper, “One psychologist (Fiske, 1993) posits that all social relationships reduce to four forms of interaction: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. People develop their capacities for social interaction in that order, from infancy through early childhood. The sharing, ranking, and pricing forms correspond to the tribal, hierarchical, and market forms, respectively. The equality-matching form, which is mainly about equal-status peer-group behavior, does not correspond to any single form; it has some attributes that fit under the network form, but other attributes (e.g., reciprocity, feuding, revenge) fit better under the tribal form.”