Nora Machado

Complex Social Organization: Multiple Organizing Modes, Structural Incongruence, and Mechanisms of Integration

This article conceptualizes and analyses a type of complex social organization consisting of heterogeneous organizing modes and social relationships, combining, for instance, relationships making up markets and hierarchies as well as various types of informal networks. Each mode is constituted and regulated on the basis of a system of social rules making up a particular normative order and operates in terms of its own particular rationality or social logic. When modes are combined or integrated into multi-institutional complexes or organizations, the resultant structure entails zones of incongruence and tension at the junctures or interfaces of the different organizing modes and social relationships. The article identifies a number of such incongruent organizing modes that are common in complex social organizations or inter- institutional complexes. It goes on to identify several of the institutional strategies and arrangements including rituals, non-task-oriented discourses, and mediating roles that actors develop and institutionalize in dealing effectively with incongruences and potential conflicts in complex, heterogeneous organizations. The article suggests that problems of structural incongruence - and the tensions and conflicts that arise in connection with it as well as responses to these - are major features of complex organizational and inter-institutional arrangements. Moreover, it suggests that social order - the shaping of congruent, meaningful experiences - in these complex organizations as in most social life builds on non-rational foundations such as rituals and non-instrumental discourses. These contribute to maintaining social order and to providing a stable context, even for rational decision-making and action.

Distributive Justice, Legitimizing Collective Choice Procedures, and the Production of Normative Equilibria in Social Groups: Towards a Theory of Social Order

This paper focuses on group normative procedures and distributional norms that are utilized in functioning groups in the production/generation of normative equilibria, that is, the major basis of social order in groups and communities. The group is an organizational arrangement with some degree of division of labor and characterized by group purposes and goals, a normative order and patterns of interaction and output. We identified three patterns of particular interest: (1) legitimation procedures in groups to resolve conflicts and make collective choices; (2) patterns of just outcomes satisfying the normatively prescribed group outcomes/outputs of a principle of distributive justice’s; (3) normative equilibria, which are group patterns of interaction or collective decision that tend to stability because they satisfy or realize one or more key group norms.

Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB): Integrating Social Science and the Humanities into Solving Sustainability Challenges

Millennial assessments of the Earth have shown the wide variety of severe sustainability challenges which result largely from human activities. To address these problems, this chapter highlights the importance of understanding and influencing human behavior, i.e. actions of individual and collective actors. The focus on human behavior, its causes, and mechanisms for influencing it need to be examined in the context of integrating physical sciences, social sciences, and the humanities to ensure that all available scientific knowledge contributes to action for sustainability. The specific program discussed for doing so is the ongoing Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB, pronounced “mob”), with this chapter explaining MAHB’s scientific approach and research agenda for sustainability.