Summary and Conclusion
Three feminist organizations, two anarchist and one liberal, have been observed. Findings are that the anarchist feminist groups were able, during the two-year period of observation and interviewing, to maintain non-hierarchical organization while at the same time achieving, to a reasonable extent, organization goals. The liberal feminist group, as expected, maintained a hierarchical organization. As explained earlier, for liberal feminists, development of non-hierarchical organization is not an immediate goal. However, as argued in the chapter describing this group, a great deal of conflict existed among organization members over goals. Values behind these goals were related to the hierarchy/non-hierarchy argument, with a networking group willing to work through hierarchy for the advancement of women, and the civic group wanting to help women in supportive/community-oriented ways.
Because the two anarchist groups have as a stated goal the building of non-hierarchical organization, they have been the most important to this study. Further, of these two organizations, the health collective clearly provides the most important data because of the constraints under which it operates as a business rather than a volunteer organization. As discussed earlier, the health collective must maintain its business financially and provide quality health care to women as well as maintain the political goals of providing an example of non-hierarchical structure. In this way, the health collective must contend with a number of business, legal, and ethical constraints that many volunteer organizations never face.
Given these differences in the two organizations, it is significant that their structure is remarkably similar.1 As indicated, both organizations explicitly state that they are committed to building and maintaining non-hierarchical organization. Commitment to this goal has led both organizations in the same direction. This has been aided by the fact that both groups have the same number of active members (approximately fifteen), and have not had to contend with the problem of factions to the same extent as larger organizations such as the business group.
MODIFIED CONSENSUS
Uniqueness of the Structure
One of the most significant aspects of these organizations, and the most important finding of this study, is the structure that flows from the particular way in which these women seem to make decisions. First, they are keenly aware of a distinction between critical and routine decisions. As stated in the health collective chapter, decisions that are critical are those that have the potential to change the organization’s direction. Those that are routine are important to its daily operation but not likely to raise significant questions about overall policy. Within the literature on organizations, the distinction between critical and routine decisions is not new. What is new is the way in which feminists have structured organizations in light of this distinction.
In both the health collective and the peace group, critical decisions are reserved for the entire membership, while routine decisions are delegated horizontally. For example, in the peace group, project groups make routine decisions. In the health collective, the coordinators and their respective committees make such decisions. It is recognized that routine decisions have the potential to become critical. In the event that they do, they are reconsidered by the entire group.
What is unique about the structure of these anarchist groups is that everyone is involved in making critical policy. In hierarchical organizations, only those at the top make critical policy, with varying degrees of input from lower levels. In the anarchist groups, routine decisions also are delegated horizontally to those who have an interest in making them. While such delegation can involve additional responsibility, authority, and expertise, it does not result in a superordinate/subordinate relationship.
In the peace group, some rotation of members through tasks helps to ensure that hierarchy does not develop. Because it is a volunteer organization, it can afford the organizational costs involved in retraining members in new areas. The health collective decided that it could not afford these costs and therefore relied on the process of the organization, including trust among members, to avoid development of hierarchy.
Thus, while the most important defining element of these structures is the reservation of critical decisions for the entire membership and the delegation of routine decisions to the few, other aspects of the internal environment are important to maintaining non-hierarchical structure. These aspects are best described by the term process, which includes the concepts of consensus, empowerment, and emerging leadership as discussed in previous chapters. Without trust among members fostered through consensus decision making and a conscious effort to avoid domination, hierarchy would be difficult to avoid. In this way, the political ideals of the members, the ideological commitments to non-hierarchy, are vitally important.
Through study of these anarchist groups, a model of modified consensual organization has been constructed. Again, the most important defining element is the delegation of routine decisions to the few and the reservation of critical decisions for the many. An example of such delegation in the peace group is the group’s representative to the Peace and Justice Center’s board. This person has an awareness of which decisions are critical and should be brought back to the organization as a whole. This person once was asked to approve a new group’s entry to center membership. The group seeking to enter the center was not committed to nonviolence. The admission of a group not committed to nonviolence could have had great impact on all the center organizations. The peace group’s representative to the Peace and Justice Center recognized this as a critical decision, one her entire organization would need to discuss. This type of decision is carried back to the full membership.
Operating Mechanisms
For the peace group and health collective alike, recognition of ability or expertise within their memberships is important. The structure of the peace group, including its project groups, Redirection and Community Action, maximizes the skills of its membership. It also has an educational function, in that those who wish to work in an area they know little about may rotate into that area and be trained by other members. Rotation allows for personal development. For the health collective, rotation of tasks has become more difficult, because of the costs of retraining. Some tasks within the clinic and administrative jobs at the front desk rotate, while other tasks have developed into permanent positions.
This structure developed out of ten years of experimentation in finding the best ways to recognize and utilize expertise within the organization, and led to development of the coordinator positions. Coordinators are delegated responsibility from the entire staff/board. Yet they also have a responsibility to educate the rest of the staff as to their knowledge of a specific area of routine work, such as medical protocol.
Another characteristic of this modified non-hierarchical structure is an attempt to minimize power and maximize empowerment. For women in both the peace group and health collective, power is described as something bestowed upon a person or something that is taken from someone else. It is a relational concept that has a win/lose element to it. For the women of the peace group and health collective, voting as a form of decision making is perceived as a win/lose situation. That is why they reject voting as a main form of decision making. Voting, for these women, means that there will always be some organization members who perceive they have “lost.” With consensus decision making, based on the concept of empowerment, it is perceived that everyone “wins” because all members agree to the final decision. In this way, empowerment is a key concept behind the operation of the group. It relates to the structure and, in the attempt to avoid positions and rank, to the organization’s operation through consensus.
A third characteristic of this model is clarity of goals. It is interesting that descriptions and discussions centering on consensual organization often indicate that goals are diffuse. This was a criticism of the consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement in the 1960s and ‘70s. For these groups, this criticism may have been valid. But it does not apply to the peace group or to the health collective. Goals for both these groups are very clear. In the case of the health collective, the goal is providing quality health care for and by women, in the context of feminist goals of equality for women. The peace group’s goals are to work for peace and justice as a group committed to feminist goals, with a specific focus on working against the manufacture and sale of war toys. The women interviewed in both these organizations were able to state these goals and explain how their organization worked toward them.
Members of these groups also indicated that as the structure of the organization evolved, goals became clearer. In addition, they believed that a relationship existed between clear goals and the ease with which consensual process could work. They explained that clarity of goals led to a foundation upon which consensus could be built. Goals often reflect values held by an organization’s members. If there is a similarity in values, consensus is possible, because there is little divisive opinion. Thus, clarity of goals becomes an important element in a non-hierarchical model. It is interesting to note that the leading complaint of women in the business group was confusion over goals. In this case, conflicting goals became associated with hierarchical, non-consensual structure.
There was a great degree of conflict over what the business group’s organizational goals should be and how their organization should work to achieve those goals, once identified. The “networking” group wanted to utilize membership connections in a way that was very concrete, by actually entering into business dealings with other members. The “civic” group indicated an interest in the general social support of other women in the professions. The stated goals of the organization indicated both these interests. The result was very real conflict within the organization.
Given the above discussion, modified consensual organization may be seen to contain the following components: a distinction between critical and routine decisions, with critical decisions reserved for the many and routine decisions delegated horizontally to the few; recognition of ability or expertise rather than rank or position; empowerment as a basis of consensual process; and clear goals arrived at through consensual process.
TOWARD DECISIONS WITHOUT HIERARCHY
The subject of decisions without hierarchy has never received more public attention than it is receiving now. A vast array of organizations, from computer firms to universities to auto makers, are currently attempting to restructure at least part of their decision-making processes in order to become more consensual. The question is: Why? At least part of the answer lies in the fact that women who have had experience with consensus, and prefer it to voting and hierarchy, have brought the idea into the workplace. As more and more of these women have achieved positions of decision making within large-scale organizations, they have been able to implement their ideas. This is the result of feminist interventions.
Interestingly, at the same time, Japanese firms operating by consensus have made their way into the United States and demonstrated that consensual structure can produce high-quality products and high-level sales. One need only look at the success of Honda and Toyota to substantiate this point. By comparison, the hierarchically organized American autofirms have been left in the dust. With record low sales, some are now making attempts at emulating Japanese firms.2 In this and other cases, prospects for profit have brought intense attention to the benefits of consensus, which feminists and others have known about for decades.
As corporate leaders have assessed both the positive and negative aspects of hierarchy, they have come to recognize the importance of small group behavior within a larger decision-making process. They have accepted the curvilinear relationship between information-processing requirements and the utility of hierarchy: hierarchy is not efficient in organizational settings where there is too little or too much information. At the very least they are asking the question: To what extent can the consensual process exhibited by some small groups be applied in large-scale organization settings?
This study contributes to the literature of organizations with regard to the above question. The modified consensual structure developed by the health collective in particular distinguishes decision-making types in a way that needs to be tested in large-scale organizations. Critical decisions reserved for the many and routine decisions delegated horizontally to the few circumvent some major problems for which consensual-style organization has been criticized.
While consensual organizations focus less on efficiency as an important goal, constraints in the environment of large-scale organizations make efficiency difficult to ignore. The distinction between critical and routine decisions as implemented by the health collective responds to a need for efficiency with regard to routine matters. This kind of structure may provide enough efficiency for some types of larger-scale organizations, particularly high-technology industries.3
It is sometimes difficult in a world that operates by hierarchy to find the language to describe another mode of operation. The identification and description of the modified consensual model of the anarchist feminist organizations that are the focus of this study represents an attempt to do this. The development of this model is only a beginning, not an end. The pervasiveness of this type of organization needs to be documented. The question of gender differences in organizations needs to be explored. By addressing these new questions, we will expand the range of possible structures, from which we may select those best suited to achieve organization goals.
NOTES
1. There is no overlapping membership between the groups.
2. See General Motors’ new Saturn plant, for example.
3. William G. Ouchi, “Markets, Bureaucracies, and Clans,” Administrative Science Quarterly 225 (March 1980): 129–41.