If we make peaceful revolution impossible, we make violent revolution inevitable. – JFK
We live in a particular time, which is tinged with a political revolution in (Middle East), and in the other hand huge economic mutation within (BRIC).
Indeed, many sociologists and politicians are still unable to agree on how to name this kind of anarchic movement that sprung up around the world, neither the contemporary economists have come to define this issue.
However, there is some hidden evidence if we try to re-trace neoclassical theories that have since emerged, we will see how there has always been a direct or indirect link between the governance of organizations and revolutions that may arise form different type of leadership.
We have to comeback a little bit in history, to understand the foundations of the industrial (economic) revolutions:
Emile Durkheim, a famous French theorist who has extended and developed the ideas of Adam Smith commonly called « the father of the economy, » in his book 1893 about the shift from agrarian societies to industrial companies, in which he assumed that they are mainly caused by the Industrial Revolution. The first organizational theorists then resume these concepts as key dimensions to define and describe complex organizations.
Subsequently, the German economist and sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), who afterward sought to understand how industrialization affects society, but also about effects on structures of authority.
According to Weber, before industrialization, societies where organized around traditional forms of authority, or charismatic. Traditional authority for him inherited statuses defined and communicated in the past. For example, the inheritance of the property of the father by the son is characteristic of the aristocracy in many societies today; as yesterday. For the charismatic authority, the rights of leadership are awarded to individuals whose magical powers of attraction and influence on others justify the authority, without further need for legitimating. Historical examples of such charisma found among religious leaders such as Christ or Muhammad (SAW), while recent examples often come from politics, with figures such as Gandhi, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
The kings and queens are also an interesting mix of traditional authority and charismatic authority: in the eyes of their subjects, the divine rights of monarchs are supposed to perpetuate the bloodline but are also seen as falling metaphysical relationship with God, whose power is not to be discussed.
Weber believes that industrialization created a third form of authority, and he believes that the emergence of bureaucratic structures of authority is better than both traditional authority and charismatic authority as in the bureaucracy, choice of those to whom is entrusted the authority is determined rationally by legally binding rules and procedures.
In these structures of authority, laws and standards are the basis and justification rules. Using a principle of legal rational authority allows a company to avoid both the problems of succession to find another charismatic leader replacing the missing one and the problem of leaving the authority to natural heirs who may not be willing or able to take on responsibility. Hence, as part of the legal rational authority, a society has an unlimited supply of people from which it can appoint a leader because he is able to make rational choices based on superior leadership skills or technical type.
In his opinion, rational social systems will gradually replace the cult of personality and nepotism by a selection based on the merit of those who will be given authority over others. Which is what we may call “meritocracy”.
Though, we can say that this anarchy is ultimately a kind of late industrial revolution in the developing countries, which will certainly bring a change in the type of governance as it was the case for the West more than a century ago.
Thus, history is being repeated again…
By Karim. O, PhD.
