💾 Archived View for gemini.ucant.org › organisations › org-form-fetishism.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:15:26. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-10)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Organisational form fetishism

There seems to be a phenomenon of some people fetishising certain organisational forms.

That is to say, some individuals can't seem to avoid trying to shoehorn every organisation into their favorite organisational form. No matter what type of organisation it is contemplated to establish, our sufferer will insist that it be founded as his favorite kind, regardless of whether that's appropriate.

To some extent, this will just be a case of "chasing the dragon". If an organisational form worked well for someone in the past, it may bring back fond memories of people working together harmoniously for the common good, and these can become attached to or fixated upon the precise legal arrangements structuring that cooperation.

Ultimately, the fetish really is just an epiphenomenon of bush lawyering. Choice of organisational form is mainly a legal question, albeit one which often does not require paying for legal advice from a qualified professional. And there lies the problem: actual lawyers have professional ethical obligations, and insurance, and so on, but people who just happen to know a lot about the law don't. Getting fixated on a particular way of organising things is simply not compatible with impartially advising paying clients about how to organise things. The fixation therefore only arises in low-stakes scenarios, or, more precisely, where someone, however knowledgable, allows himself to consider the question of organisational forms where his own professional reputation is not at stake.

Most common forms subject to the fetish

The following organisational forms seem in my experience to be particularly prone to laymen getting overenthusiastic about recommending them where they're inappropriate:

Taboo forms

There is a kind of inverse of the "organisational form fetishism" phenomenon, and that is the taboo. This normally attaches to the company legal form, and generally amounts to conflating "company" with "for-profit company owned by the outgroup", to the exclusion of non-profit companies, mutuals, charitable companies and companies wholly owned by the government.

The company form can easily be used for non-profit, community purposes. But this fact can be easily denied, too, at little cost to the denier.

An aggravating factor in prejudice against companies (and to some extent other corporate forms) is anti-formalism. Anti-formalism is the objection to formality as such: not wanting to have appropriate decision-making, record-keeping, elections, accountability and so on. It runs parallel to a hypertrophic impulse towards simplicity, as promoted for example by the Quakers and the plain language movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimony_of_simplicity