The Cultureship Blog

-         Making Community Contribution & Recognition come alive

I was trying to explain our way of Community Contribution & Recognition to a group of people the other day.

By this we refer to what we see as the key dynamising force of a productively happy life – the need to be part of a productive social grouping, the need to be able to play one’s part (subject to generous welfare provision which recognises essential human worth), and the need to be recognised in multiple ways beyond the simply material.

CCR is best envisaged as a universal force – it operates in and outside of work places and organisations overlook its development and maintenance at their peril. Problems of a CCR deficit can rapidly move from being corporate culture dysfunction to threats to core sustainability.

I thought I had managed to get my core points across by referring to my favoured analogy of Tribal Values and the tale of a Stockade Society. I would say something along the lines of:

“You come into this stockade, or you are born in this stockade. You raise children, you hunt, you look after the elderly, you build and repair, you gather fruit, you fish, you cook, you make clothes, you look after the sick and the elderly – who are valued unconditionally. But if you wish to do none of these things, the entrance to our stockade is also an exit.”

And when I had told my story and made my points about CCR, someone asked a very good question – “Isn’t this just another story of people getting by the best they can and nothing else, nothing special?”

I realised then I have been “drying it out”, robbing the stories and the sharing of some its mystery and excitement in just the way that I condemn in other methodologies of the human sciences, particularly those regarding Organisational Development and Management Science.

I detest hard structuralism, which reduces everything to inert structures, allowing of no change, no human agency and, invariably, precious little hope – it all tends to be about elites and the majority oppressed.

- But this brand of hard structuralism, beyond its totalising realism, lets itself down further by failing to offer up any practical options, any relief from the miserablism it posits (we have a strong belief in what we call a Radical Emotionalism which hunts out Tracks of Tears, seeking to dry them at source, and Margins of Jagged Difference, which we seek to smooth and always roll back to a comfortable balance between sameness, comfortable difference and a queered tolerance).

I find risible various functionalist views, that still run rampant across many organisational interpretations, in that they assume an essentially peaceable balance of everything in its place and everything with its own purpose (have these people ever been in a big organisation?!).

And beyond such specific perspectives, there is a general theoretical paradigm that demands an arid, usually quantitative, jargon-ridden abstraction that robs people of their very personhoods, evacuating emotions and even cognition, leaving putative robotic receptacles for management diktats (or, more likely, the latest faddish theories of far-distanced business school researchers…..).

But these comments make it clear that we need to be saying more about our own CCR, to ensure it is not misinterpreted as just another piece of human-denying and overly mechanistic systems theory.

It is all about a bridging of the spiritual and the material, which is a tremendously difficult span for mainstream human science to achieve. Anything remotely of this nature tends to get hived off into the wacky fringes of such as Parapsychology.

This is where we in fact refuse to be dragged down into biological (genetic) explanations alone. Whilst Sociobiology (more latterly Evolutionary Psychology) might try to explain Community in terms of optimal security and breeding opportunities, Contribution as a bolster to Community through maximum effort, and Recognition as the selfish core to broader social motivation, we call for more texture and more possibilities.

- Mystery, Magic, Hope, Desire: Enchantment…… in fact all the things it is so easy through cleverness-claims to deny – and all the things, in fact, that make the human condition not only survivable, but, indeed, if we only let, on occasions quite beautiful.

CCR does have utility grounded in basic survivability, viability and optimisation. We would not wish to deny this for one second. Indeed, as self-styled organisational productivity enhancers, we would seek to publicise and prioritise this claim.

However, this is where we quite deliberately and powerfully seek to bridge the material and the spiritual – we seek to take a major stride from this, our Neopragmatism, forwards into our Humanism. And all of this is itself, remember, only a contrivance of our human penchant for dualisms…..we seek to divide and label for the sake of our pedantic and puny intellects – the world is capable of an infinite juggling act of multiple (or a single) meanings that need no such thin slicing (one could further, rather easily, and point out there are nonesuch divisions at all outside of our attempts at understandings).

In terms of Tribal Values attention needs to be drawn also to the beliefs, the dance, the ritual and the mystery – to all the magic and mystique that ties all societies, not just the old or distant ones that we patronise through a hauteur born of present tense rationalism.

These joining spans, to satisfy the chasms in human understanding, reach across to the infinite open-endedness of productive community, the splendour of heartfelt contribution and to the deep inner warmth of recognition. “Reciprocity” doesn’t even come close in such contexts.

There’s perhaps another dimension, too, of gainful looking:

We build up Community by appealing to our souls with Humanism.

We develop Contribution by talking to and through our minds with Neopragmatism.

We dispense and valorise Recognition through the visceral emotive interactions of hearts through Radical Emotionalism.

- Souls, minds and hearts……..a heady and a hearty mix of metaphors, a multi-sensory and multi-dimensional appeal to goodness wherever it can be accessed and set free.

In all of these ways we attempt to traverse a compelling line between the excessively ethereal of lofty values and the over-aridness of the insistently corporeal.

- So, come into our tribal life – more accurately, throw yourself whole-heartedly (and soulfully and mindfully) into all your tribal lives, as you will be part of many……..it can be remarkably good for all of us.