Why say orgregore?

I’ve been using the term orgregore to refer to supra-human systems with agency and perhaps sentience that emerge from the joint actions of groups of people. Why not just call them organizations or institutions?

I’ll explore two alternatives to the term orgregore: institution and organization.

Institutions

The first reason not to use the term institution is that its literature is so vast and connotations so wide. [1] It’s pretty much the topic of the entire field of sociology. [2] I don’t think one can pin down the meaning of “institution.” At least orgregore is a term I made up and so I can define it to mean what I want it to mean.

The second reason is that institutions as commonly defined in sociology exclude phenomena I’m interested in. Institutions are described as patterns of norms that define behavior in social relationships, and as rules of the game in a society. [3] The entities I’m interested in are not just rules: they’re rules plus the people (and other entities like algorithm-driven applications) that act in the world. By analogy, I’m not just interested in software, but software plus hardware that’s running it; not just an organism’s DNA (genotype), but it’s actual form in the environment (phenotype).

In addition, the institutions-as-rules definition includes things I would not count as orgregores, like the family, marriage, money, contract, and economic and penal systems. [4] I’m interested in agents, and institutions, defined as rules or norms, don’t have agency on their own. Think of a stock market: it has well defined members, but participants don’t have joint intentions. Each acts in their private interest.

In common usage, “institution” can also mean “an established organization or corporation (such as a bank or university) especially of a public character” (Merriam-Webster). [5] Just as with the sociological definition, I think of orgregores as a larger category. Corporate persons are considered to the board of directors (plus, sometimes, senior executives), or as the shareholders. However, employees make things happen and I would include them in a corporate orgregore. [6] 

Groups of people don’t have to be formally incorporated to develop joint intentions and behave in ways that can’t be reduced to the actions of the constituent individuals. Two examples: (1) Films are nominally made by a production company that contracts ad hoc with the director, design and production staff, distributors, etc. However, even “auteur” films are collaborative efforts since a director cannot do everything. A film is the result of a complex, collective effort. (2) Symphony orchestras can develop a characteristic style and sound that has more to do with the players than the corporation they work for. [7]

These group effects can even arise in very small groups. (1) The offbeat film Koyaanisqatsi was the result of a close collaboration between director Godfrey Reggio, cinematographer Ron Fricke, and composer Philip Glass (cf. interviews with them in The Qatsi Trilogy DVD set, The Criterion Collection, 2012). (2) String quartets develop their rapport over a long period of collaboration (DW interview with Julia Fischer).

On the other extreme, social and political movements—such as those denoted by labels like the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, QAnon, or Black Lives Matter—are not institutions in the sociological sense (I think) but do have joint intentions, share perceptions and desires, and act collectively to advance their goals. I’m not yet sure I would count them as orgregores—for example, their blurry boundaries raise questions about distinguishing between entity and environment—but they signal that fuzzy groups animated by a strong, shared impulse can act collectively. 

Organizations

The concept of “an organization” combines the rules that order a group of people with the people themselves, as in a corporation or association. In that sense, it’s equivalent to “an orgregore” in some cases, such as companies. However, I think there are groupings wider than an organization that are orgregores. 

One example is the business ecosystem built on behavioral advertising in social media. It encompasses not companies like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, but also the content producers, ad agencies and product marketers that jointly benefit from highly engaging online material. Another example is bogeyman of fifty years ago that’s still doing well: the military-industrial complex.

I suspect there are also cases of joint intentions leading to agency in the overlapping memberships of multiple organizations, for example, the WTO, World Bank, IMF, and OECD. These organizations have similar but not identical memberships, and there may be cases where action arises (nominally under the auspices of one of the organizations) that reflects a consensus in this group of groups. Another example might be the raft of European institutions: EU, NATO, the Council of Europe, CEPT, European Economic Area, etc.

Work that is done in a particular area, such as spectrum policy, may fall under the auspices of single organization, such as the ITU’s Radiocommunication sector (ITU-R). However, the work is done in both narrower and broader contexts. Global spectrum policymaking is structured around the 3- to 4-yearly World Radio Conferences (WRCs), but a lot of work is done in preparatory meetings of regional organizations (like CITEL in the Americas) in the years leading up to the four-week crunch of final negotiations resulting in a WRC Final Acts (2019). The outcome in aggregate (like that of most legislative processes) doesn’t reflect the specific wishes of any of parties but emerges from bargaining.

Communities of practice like an academic discipline may be an orgregore if its collective behavior is strong enough, e.g., by setting research agendas, defining which approaches are valid, enshrining received wisdom, and ostracizing heretics. The members may belong to many overlapping organizations, such as professional associations, universities, conference and journal committees. This community may be underpinned by an institution in terms of accepted rules of the game, but its beliefs and outputs go beyond norms.

So what is an orgregores, then?

I’m still wrestling with the nature of orgregores and how to best characterize them. [8] Here are some of my current criteria:

• A group entity consisting of several (potentially very many) people.

• It has agency, marked by attributes like autonomy, goal orientation, and adaptability, that enable to act in the world.

• It is emergent. It depends on, but cannot be reduced to, the agency of its constituents. One cannot effectively understand or interact with the group agent if one conceptualizes it (e.g., enumerates its beliefs and actions) only in terms of individuals.

To wrap it up, here are some entities categorized (by my lights) as institutions, organizations, or ogregores. (Since I’m still unsure about exactly what I want “orgregore” to denote, and since some entities but not others in a category might qualify, I’ll use orgregore* as a short-hand for “potentially/possibly an orgregore.”) The categories intersect, but orgregores are not identical to, or a subset of, either institutions or organizations.

Institution but not orgregore*

• Money
• Stock market
• Marriage
• Football
• Political system

Orgregore* but not institution

• Company broadly defined, including shareholders, managers, employees, contractors
• Fans of a pop star
• Specific political party

Orgregore* but not organization

• Community of practice (e.g., academic discipline)
• Political movement (e.g., QAnon, social justice movement, Islamic fundamentalism)
• Commercial entities with shared interests (e.g., social media, Hollywood, the US oil & gas drilling industry)
• Non-commercial entities with shared interests (e.g., multilateral trade-oriented economic institutions, European institutions)

Both orgregore* and organization

• A judiciary (e.g., U.S. federal courts)
• Specific political party
• Standard-setting body (e.g., IEEE, W3C)

Notes

[1] As the article “Institutional Analysis in Sociology” in Vol. 7 of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,  2nd ed., 2008 puts it, “sociology has from its origins to the present time steadfastly placed the examination of institutional structures and processes at the center of its scholarly agenda.” It also notes that “Although attention from sociologists has been steady, the ways in which institutions are viewed and explained have varied substantially among scholars and over time.” 

[2] From “Sociology” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 1968 (Vol 15): “A commonly accepted definition of sociology as a special science is that it is the study of social aggregates and groups in their institutional organization, of institutions and their organization, and of the causes and consequences of changes in institutions and social organization.”

[3] (My italics in the quotes that follow.) From the article “Sociology” in Vol. 15 of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,  2nd ed., 2008: “Social institutions are general patterns of norms that define behavior in social relationships. Institutions define how people ought to behave and legitimate the sanctions applied to behavior.” The article “Social Institutions” in Vol. 14 says, “it is tentatively suggested that institutions or patterns of institutionalization can be defined here as regulative principles which organize most of the activities of individuals in a society into definite organizational patterns . . . .” The Wikipedia’s article on institutions is less authoritative, but not behind a pay wall. There we find definitions like “socially sanctioned, that is, collectively enforced expectations with respect to the behavior of specific categories of actors or to the performance of certain activities” (Streeck & Thelen), “a set of rules that structure social interactions in particular ways” (Jack Knight), “rules of the game in a society” and “humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interactions” (Douglass North), “persistent and connected sets of rules (formal or informal) that prescribe behavioral roles, constrain activity, and shape expectations” (Keohane), “integrated systems of rules that structure social interactions” (Geoffrey Hodgson). Samuel P. Huntington defined institutions as “stable, valued, recurring patterns of behavior.”

[4] Cf. the examples in the Wikipedia “Institution” article; see also “Sociology” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 1968 (Vol 15), e.g., “Contract is a good example of a social institution . . . .”

[5] This is close to List & Pettit’s conception of a group agent: “The group agents we have focused on in this book are of the actively incorporated kind, organized to function reliably as agents.” (List, C., & Pettit, P. (2011: 193). Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents. Oxford University Press.) 

[6] Including employees and other actors who shape corporate action—like consultants, designers, lawyers, key customers and suppliers, and bondholders—creates a fuzzy boundary for an orgregore, raising questions about the scope of its agency. A board of directors is well-defined; shareholders less so, but major shareholders are known and relative stable. 

[7] Even while framing its description of the trademark Berlin Philharmonic sound in terms of big-name conductors, a description of the orchestra points out that the members appoint their chief conductor in a secret vote. Another travel website says that the orchestra has developed “a distinct musical style.”

[8] There are many questions, including whether orgregores exist at all, or are just a nominalist illusion; whether there are more or less well-formed orgregores, and whether this relates to degrees of agency; whether joint intentionality is a criterion for orgregores, as List & Petitt have it for group agency.