Paul Diduch has asked why I use the term ogregore rather than just calling a corporation a corporation, or an organization. He may be right. Most, though perhaps not all, things I call ogregores are organizations. I’ll argue that the categories of ogregore and organization overlap but are not the same. Paul suggested that an ogregore might be an organization with an eerie agent-like effect; it might also distinguished by being more powerful than run-of-the-mill organizations.
I’ll first explore the intersection between ogregores and organizations, and then explore the significance of being in both categories.
Ogregores and organizations
Definitions
The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Sociology (2001) defines organizations as goal-directed, boundary-maintaining, socially-constructed systems of human activity. Wikibooks describes organization as the coordinated and purposeful action by people, framed by formal membership and institutional rules, to yield some common product. [1]
I made up the term ogregore (or orgregore), inspired by the notion of an egregore, defined by Wiktionary.org (accessed 23 Mar 2024) as “An autonomous psychic entity that is composed of, and influences, the thoughts of a group of people.” Since I don’t have any occult knowledge or experience, an orgregore/ogregore is a materialist version of an egregore. Since egregores are a fuzzy concept, my ogregore notion is fuzzy too.
The minimal conditions for ogregores I outlined in 2022 still largely make sense to me: An ogregore is a group of people bound together by one or more shared characteristics and two-way social ties (i.e., a “catnet” a la Harrison White [2]) that is an agent in its own right. To capture its emergent, collective agency I’d now add a substitution rule inspired by Manual DeLanda: the group’s behavior does not change if people in specific roles can be changed. [3]
The discussion that follows will argue that ogregores and organizations overlap but aren’t the same thing.
I’m also reluctant to just use “organization” instead of “ogregore” because I want a term that (a) denotes an organization as a single entity (b) doesn’t also connote the individuals that make it up. We sometimes talk of an organization as a singular entity, using “it.” At other times we talk of it using “they” (in the plural sense, not the non-gendered sense), suggesting that we’re thinking of its constituent people. [4] Ogregore is a term that unambiguously describes an organization as entity rather than as a bunch of people.
With all that said, my current best definition of an ogregore is “a potent group entity.”
Organizations that are ogregores
Most of the things I think of as ogregores, like Big Tech companies and government agencies, are organizations. However, there are ogregores that are not formal organizations; their boundaries are fuzzy but they exhibit emergent, collective action. I listed some in “Why say orgregores?”: communities of practice (e.g., media studies), social and political movements (e.g., social justice, white nationalism), and shared interest groups with a constellation of partially overlapping formal associations (e.g., Hollywood, the US oil & gas drilling industry, venture capital). I would now add loosely federated network organizations like the Catholic Church (The Pillar) and the Goenka meditation movement (Wikipedia). The organizations cause effects in the world that their members would decry, like sexual abuse in churches (NYTimes) and adverse mental health effects of meditation (FT, Harper’s).
Not organizations, not ogregores
However, I would not count all institutions and social phenomena as ogregores. I don’t think of -isms like capitalism and socialism as ogregores since they don’t have boundaries. I exclude markets since there isn’t joint intent among the constituent people. Corporations like the NYSE aren’t markets in the sense of “a meeting together of people for the purpose of trade” (Merriam-Webster).
Not organizations, perhaps ogregores
On the other hand, there may be social entities with emergent agency (i.e., ogregores) that are not organizations, even fuzzy ones. Market frenzies like crypto and the Tulip Mania may have enough coherence to have agency, even though they’re not even informal organizations. They fall somewhere between movements and markets.
Organizations but not ogregores
However, not all organizations are what I think of as ogregores. For example, the PTA of a small elementary school is a legal organization, but I don’t think it’s large enough that it’s worth distinguishing between the intent of the individual members and the collective intent of the group. There’s no emergence, and the substitution rule doesn’t apply.
This is fuzzy in the same way that different people count different things as egregores.
Bottom line
To a first approximation, ogregores are organizations. However, there are ogregores that are not organizations, and organizations that are not ogregores. This may be irreducibly fuzzy in the way of all social concepts. For comparison, different people count different things as egregores. [5]
What makes for an ogregore?
I’ll now explore some potential attributes that distinguishes ogregores and organizations.
Charisma
Clearly, an ogregore is a fuzzy concept. Paul suggested that my sense of it might pertain best to a spectrum of effects, that is, an eerie sort of agent-like effect that some, but not all corporations generate. Ogregore would be the term for this sort of effect.
This reminded me not just of esoteric associations of egregores, but the aura of charismatic people: saints’ halos, Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field. Perhaps ogregoreness (and egregoreness?) is to organizations as charisma is to people. Not everybody has it. Paul speculated that an ogregore is a corporation plus the halo, an organization with charisma.
I’m intrigued by possible connections to Samo Burja’s Great Founder Theory. It’s clear that a corporation has effects can be ascribed to neither just the collective nor just the CEO. The group agent plans, constrains, and acts, but special individuals can and do make a difference. Their relative importance varies from case to case and from time to time. [6]
It may be that an organization’s halo is an observer’s experience of its coherence and effectiveness—the extent to which the whole is more than the parts, the degree to which it has a life of its own. I’m uneasy about this, though, because it’s subjective. It doesn’t seem amenable to rational analysis or empirical verification. [7] Paul suggested that such a notion of ogregore can be rigorous, but only if it has a well-defined range of meaning and clear application. This needs more work.
Power
Alternatively, perhaps organizations with “a lot” of power can be labeled ogregores. [8]
When I explored degrees of agenthood in 2022, I looked at things like criterion richness, degrees of agency, hierarchy, and the ability to move matter, money, and minds. (My reservations marked in italics, thus.)
Criterion richness refers to the ways in which an agent meets minimal criteria like List & Pettit’s (2011) “representational states, motivational states, and a capacity to process them and to act on their basis.” If an organization has extensive and rich representational states (by virtue of sophisticated and well-populated databases, say), nuanced and/or decisive motivational states (because of well-functioning management processes, say), and/or a powerful capacity to act (because of its size, scope, or reach, say) it might qualify as an ogregore. The trouble with this is that richness is not a dichotomous variable, so one would have to wave your hands about how rich is rich enough. There is also not just a single criterion.
Degrees of agency might include minimal, intentional, and reasoning agency. Collegial courts are a paradigmatic example of reasoning agency. A suitably governed larger organization might also qualify. Arguably, all organizations are reasoning agents because they are made up of reasoning people. However, when the human constituents don’t reason—cf. the madness of crowds—presumably the organization doesn’t either. Non-reasoning organizations can have a lot of power, so I don’t think this criterion helps much.
Position in a hierarchy can be a marker of power, e.g., U.S. federal vs. local government. But there are exceptions, e.g., the weakness of the EU vis a vis the nation states. In some organizations, lower-ranking individuals may be more powerful, cf. a scheming vizier and a puppet king. I think it makes more sense to just look at power directly, which takes me to the next one.
“Moving matter, money, and minds” refers to the ability of an agent to affect its environment. (This aspect overlaps with criterion richness above, e.g., capacity to act is one of List & Pettit’s agency criteria.) The items indicate that there are various ways for organizations to exert power. This is another continuous variable which doesn’t lend itself to in/out categorizations but it’s probably the one I’d choose if I had to pick one from the list above.
Bottom line
Adding in charisma and power, an alternative to my definition of an ogregore as a potent group entity might be “a group entity with eerie power.”
Updates
27 Mar 2024: Added definition, “a group entity with eerie power.”
Endnotes
[1] H. E. Aldrich and P. V. Marsden, Encyclopedia of Sociology (Vol. 1. 2nd ed.), Macmillan (2001), p. 393-94 “A simple definition is that organizations are goal-directed, boundary-maintaining, socially-constructed systems of human activity. Some definitions add other criteria, such as deliberateness of design, the existence of status structures, patterned understandings between participants, orientation to an environment, possession of a technical system for accomplishing tasks, and substitutability of personnel (Scott 1998). Organizations are purposive systems in which members behave as if they are committed to the organization's goals, although individual participants might personally feel indifferent toward those goals or even alienated from their organizations. Concerted collective action toward an apparent common purpose also distinguishes organizations from social units such as friendship circles, audiences, and mass publics. Because many organizational forms are now institutionalized in modern societies, people readily turn to them or construct them when a task or objective exceeds their own personal abilities and resources (Meyer and Rowan 1977; Zucker 1988).”
Wikibooks notes that an organization is defined by who belongs to it, how they communicate, its autonomy, and its rules of action.
Sociology recognizes formal and informal organizations; I’ll take “organization” to denote the formal version.
See also Organization in Sociology and Sociology of Organizations on https://www.iresearchnet.com/, e.g., “There is, however, no generally accepted definition of an organization since its meaning may vary in terms of the different sociological approaches applied to the subject.”
[2] Nick Crossley, quoted by Mark Carrigan: “Catnets exist where a set of actors are both internally densely networked in a relevant and meaningful manner and also share a common ‘category’ or ‘collective identity’. . . . according to [originator of the term, Harrison] White, because the combination of networks and identities is particularly conducive to collective action.” I don’t think catnet is sufficient and hence I’m inclined to require agency, outputs, and joint intention as well. (Arguably, joint intention is a category.)
[3] See, e.g., DeLanda, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, p. 37: “… a large organization may be said to be the relevant actor in the explanation of an interorganizational process if a substitution of the people occupying specific roles in its authority structure leaves the organizational policies and its daily routines intact.” DeLanda’s approach is based on Deleuze assemblage theory. DeLanda describes assemblages as “wholes whose properties emerge from the interactions between parts.”
[4] Note for example lemma 2 b in https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/organization: an administrative and functional structure (such as a business or a political party) also : the personnel of such a structure. Or compare lemmas 1 (fellowship, companions, guests, …) and 2 (group, body, organization, unit, …) in https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/company.
[5] From the Introduction to Mark Stavish Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny (2018): “We also hear this concept repeated in the Christian scriptures, although as we will see there is disagreement among authorities on whether this constitutes an egregore in either the classical or modern sense of the word (paraphrased from Matthew 18:20): ‘When two or more are gathered in my name, I will be in the midst of them.’” Stavish quotes Mouni Sadhu as defining an egregore as “a collective entity, such as a nation, state, religions and sects and their adherents, and even minor human organizations.” He quotes Dubuis as saying, “What is an egregore? It is the psychic and astral entity of a group. All members of a group, a family, a club, a political party, a religion, or even a country, psychically included in the egregore of the organization to which they belong.” This range from a family all the way to a nation is vast.
[6] Samo Burja doesn’t say much about charisma in Great Founder Theory (manuscript, 2020). I think, for him, special leaders demonstrate vision, strategic thinking, and social engineering competence. But maybe charisma is a (the?) way that these skills, in aggregate, are experienced by other people.
[7] The literature on charisma, management leadership, and measurement is thin; only 27 Web of Science hits. The most-cited paper is “Measuring Transformational and Charismatic Leadership: Why isn't Charisma Measured?” :-)
[8] David Runciman talks about “superagency,” in The Handover: How We Gave Control of Our Lives to Corporations, States and AIs, but doesn’t define the term.
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