Comments on: Marvin Brown on the civic, the private, and the commercial https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/marvin-brown-on-the-civic-and-the-commercial/2011/04/11 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Mon, 11 Apr 2011 15:57:21 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 By: Poor Richard https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/marvin-brown-on-the-civic-and-the-commercial/2011/04/11/comment-page-1#comment-483063 Mon, 11 Apr 2011 15:57:21 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=15187#comment-483063 A public agency, a public corporation, a partnership, and a sole-proprietorship could in actual operation be identical. The so-called “structural” distinctions are structural only in the mind. The actual musculo-skeletal structure that determines the operation of an organization exists in the person-to-person relationships. Of course, the nominal, superficial “structure” influences the psychology of the persons in those relationships, but it does not actually determine them.

I’m not saying the nominal structure is irrelevant, but that it is closer to being cosmetic. If we want to analyze organizations objectively and scientifically, we should focus on their behaviors and not on their ideas, ideologies, and nominal “skins”. Its time to get beyond ideology and taxonomy.

]]> By: Poor Richard https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/marvin-brown-on-the-civic-and-the-commercial/2011/04/11/comment-page-1#comment-483062 Mon, 11 Apr 2011 15:30:28 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=15187#comment-483062 These broad socio-economic categories like public, private, civic, commercial, etc. have little utility going forward. There are few of us who bother to ask whether something is animal, vegetable, or mineral. We are interested in other details about the relationships of one thing to another in a complex ecology. In the socio-economic ecology, private, public, and civic have been cross-pollinating and hybridizing for many generations. The categories of public-private are going the way of racial distinctions. Going forward we must ask of a person or institution “How will you treat me?”, not “What is your ethnic or ideological family history?”

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