Thanks, Jay, for raising these important questions:
At 12:24 AM 6/18/96 EDT, Jay Lemke wrote:
>When people are in the process of creating potential
>new institutions, there may be a fluidity of relationships and
>power that is not normal in stabilized institutions, a sort of
>'liminal communitas' (Turner) where Eugene's ideal might
>flourish. But most large-scale human societies have evolved to
>take advantage of the amplification effects (people acting in
>concert) of structured institutions where power differences are
>an integral part of role-differentiation. How much amplification
>can a purely human-to-human collaborative generate? Do we have to
>accept inequities at the individual level as the price for
>collective efficacy at large scales? Maybe we'd be better off
>without large-scale institutions and the large-scale effects they
>can produce; God seems to have thought so about Babel. JAY.
Some time ago Edouard Lagache raised similar questions in his dissertation
(hey, Ed, are you on the net?) by analyzing the Lave's notion of community
of practice. He came to conclusion that a community of practice where
membership is defined by practice and practice is defined by membership can
be rather small limited by personal contact of members.
I also like Jay and Edouard acknowledge that what I call "open community"
has limited local life. I define open community as such that based on
ideology of collaboration:
1) mutual respect each other (and self-respect, of course) as responsible
actors recognized as the final authority for their own actions;
2) openness and desire to align his or her own interests (and contributions)
with interests (and contributions) of other participants;=20
3) membership in the collaborative community is defined by participation.
I want to stress that these are ideological principles that guide people's
activities rather than patterns of their behavior: people eventually violate
these principles in open community, but being aware of these violations
people feel bad and try to change their behavior. I also want to remind
that I call "open community" not because all people are there but because it
promotes collaboration and open relations among people.
Unlike Edouard, I believe that open communities can build and mediate their
relations with each other by flexibly blurring their boundaries. I also
think that open communities can be institutionalized. =20
Why, thus, do open communities have extremely limited sucess in spreading so
far?
I think that the main reason is sociohistorical one. We (i.e., almost
entire humankind by now) live in the society that is based on, what I call,
the global network of alienated practices. The network is based on
alienated exchange of "services" -- people want to use of activities of
other people without becoming a participants of these activities. In brief,
locally emerging open communities are embedded in the global network that
inhibits growth of the open communities.
Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz
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Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz