Organizing becomes management

Every genuine attempt at collective organization contains the seeds of its own bureaucratic transformation. What begins as horizontal cooperation inevitably crystallizes into vertical control structures. This is not an accident or failure—it is the inherent trajectory of organized human activity.

The organizing illusion

When people first come together around shared values or goals, they believe they are creating something different. They use words like “grassroots,” “democratic,” and “participatory.” They design flat structures, consensus processes, rotating responsibilities.

This initial phase feels authentic because it is. The energy is real, the commitment genuine, the values uncompromised. But this phase cannot sustain itself beyond a critical threshold of complexity and scale.

The management emergence

As the organization grows, certain realities assert themselves:

Information asymmetries develop. Some people inevitably know more about specific domains. This knowledge becomes power, whether acknowledged or not.

Coordination costs multiply. Consensus becomes expensive. Decisions slow down. The organization faces competitive pressure from more efficiently structured competitors.

Specialization becomes necessary. The romantic ideal of everyone doing everything hits the wall of human cognitive limitations and time constraints.

External pressures intensify. Funders, regulators, and partners demand clear accountability structures. They want to know “who’s in charge.”

The transformation mechanics

The shift from organizing to management follows predictable patterns:

Stage 1: Emergency exceptions. “Just for this project, we need someone to coordinate.” Temporary hierarchy is introduced as a practical necessity.

Stage 2: Efficiency arguments. “We’re wasting time in meetings. Let’s delegate decision-making authority.” Democratic processes are streamlined away.

Stage 3: Competence narratives. “Some people are better at certain things.” Merit-based justifications emerge for permanent role differentiation.

Stage 4: Institutional logic. “This is how organizations work in the real world.” The original values are reframed as naive idealism.

The value inversion

What makes this transformation particularly insidious is how it preserves the language of the original values while inverting their substance.

“Empowerment” becomes employee development programs designed to increase productivity.

“Participation” becomes feedback sessions where input is solicited but decisions are predetermined.

“Democracy” becomes transparent communication of management decisions.

“Flat organization” becomes fewer layers of hierarchy, not no hierarchy.

The vocabulary remains, but the values it originally represented have been hollowed out and replaced with management efficiency metrics.

Why resistance fails

Attempts to resist this transformation consistently fail for structural reasons:

The resisters become the problem. Those who insist on original values are labeled as obstructionist, unrealistic, or personally difficult.

Market forces apply pressure. Organizations that resist efficient management structures get out-competed by those that embrace them.

Resource constraints tighten. Funding sources prefer organizations with clear management structures and measurable outcomes.

Burnout accelerates transition. The emotional labor of maintaining authentic organizing structures exhausts participants, making management solutions attractive.

The capture is complete

Once management structures are established, they become self-reinforcing. Managers have material interests in preserving and expanding their management roles. They hire people who accept management structures as natural. They design processes that require management oversight.

The organization develops what we might call “management DNA”—its basic processes, incentive structures, and cultural assumptions all presuppose and reinforce hierarchical relationships.

New members join an organization that looks like what they expect organizations to look like. They never experience the organizing phase. To them, management isn’t a deviation from authentic values—it’s just how things work.

The eternal return

This cycle repeats endlessly. Dissatisfied members leave to start new organizations “based on real values this time.” They recreate the organizing phase, feel the authentic energy, and believe they’ve solved the problem.

But they haven’t solved it—they’ve simply reset the timer.

Their new organization will follow the same trajectory unless they either:

1. Remain permanently small and simple (limiting impact)
2. Accept permanent inefficiency (limiting sustainability)
3. Develop new organizational technologies that somehow transcend this dynamic (not yet achieved)

Why this matters for value theory

This pattern reveals something fundamental about how values operate in human systems. Values are not stable properties that can be institutionally preserved. They are dynamic relationships that exist only within specific structural conditions.

When those conditions change—as they inevitably do through growth, complexity, and external pressure—the values don’t just weaken. They invert. The same people, using the same language, end up serving opposite purposes.

This suggests that focusing on “good values” or “authentic intentions” misses the point. The real question is: what are the structural conditions that allow certain value relationships to persist, and how do those conditions change over time?

The management trap

Modern society offers us a false choice: either accept that organizing becomes management (the “realistic” position), or keep trying to organize authentically while ignoring structural realities (the “idealistic” position).

Both positions miss the deeper issue. The problem isn’t that management is bad and organizing is good. The problem is that we have no organizational technologies that can sustain complex coordination without reproducing hierarchical control structures.

Until we develop such technologies, we will continue to cycle through the same pattern: organizing energy gets captured and redirected toward management objectives, while the language of authentic values provides cover for this transformation.

The value question

If organizing always becomes management, what does this tell us about the value of organizing itself?

Perhaps the value lies not in the institutional outcomes, but in the temporary experience of authentic cooperation. Perhaps each organizing cycle serves its purpose simply by existing, even if it cannot be sustained.

Or perhaps we should stop valorizing organizing as inherently more valuable than management, and instead focus on understanding when and why different coordination mechanisms serve human flourishing.

The question is not how to prevent organizing from becoming management. The question is how to design systems that can consciously transition between different organizational modes without losing sight of the values that originally motivated collective action.

Until we answer that question, organizing will continue to become management, and we will continue to be surprised by this entirely predictable transformation.

The cycle continues. The next organization is already being planned by people who believe they will do it differently this time.