Theory of institutions/corporations

Don't know any anarchist texts, but I'd say Foucault is a good place to start, in particular Discipline and Punish, to understand institutions. As for corporations, the book and documentary "The Corporation" is not bad. These mixed with how Marx argues individuals (but arguably institutions as well) are personifications of economic categories (which leads to determined behaviors) may together give you what you want.

Spaceman I saw the film yesterday and was also pondering this issue. I think it's in the nature of most human organisations. There is plenty of evidence of this behaviour in communist organisations.

When time and effort has been invested in a thing (organisation) you hate to see it break and make "small" individual decisions against your better knowledge. These small decisions become a force through the organisation.

Who was it who wrote about how building the pyramids entrenced the power of the Pharao? I'm guessing it was french as I remember the book as a bit slippery in that post struct sense. I'm thinking it works along the same lines that you can get locked into dependencies of organisation due to the work you've invested.

*hopes* Perhaps someone better read knows what I'm referring to above and can pick up the thread?

You could maybe look at the psychological literature. The BBC recreated Zimbardo's (in)famous prison experiment but came to slightly different conclusions.

I think market anarchist Kevin Carson's 'organisation theory' has a section critiquing hierarchical corporate forms and synthesising various literature on organisational dysfunction (I haven't read it, and it's presumably pro-market, so I dunno how useful it is).

On the other hand, Elinor Ostrom did a lot of work on self-organising institutions that function well, managing to be environmentally sustainable, resolve disputes among members etc. Many of these are fairly non-hierarchical (irrigation networks, fishermans' rotas, things like that).

Cooked

Who was it who wrote about how building the pyramids entrenced the power of the Pharao?

when i was last teaching ancient history this was the standard opinion: building the pyramids was a works-project scheme which served, among other things, to show who had the power to command such a level of corvee labor and the wealth to undertake such a monster project. don't know if that's the comment you were hoping for but this idea wasn't due to any post-structuralist theorizing.

thanks to joseph kay for the tip about elinor ostrom, whom i hadn't heard of.

@petey - Ostrom's quite an orthodox economist in a lot of her assumptions, but very unorthodox in her subject matter and conclusions. Definitely worth reading.

I also forgot to mention James C Scott's Seeing Like a State, which is really excellent. Although - as the title implies - it's focussed on state projects, he flags up in the intro that the same arguments would apply to corporate bureaucracies. He focuses on the illegibility of self-organising systems to central power - and what can't be understood can't be controlled. But attempts to impose central control therefore require radical simplification and a loss/disregarding of the practical know-how of the people directly involved, resulting in disastrous mismanagement compared to efficient, but illegible, self-organisation.

Joseph Kay

But attempts to impose central control therefore require radical simplification and a loss/disregarding of the practical know-how of the people directly involved, resulting in disastrous mismanagement compared to efficient, but illegible, self-organisation.

this was an Austrian argument against centralization: that it's impossible to acquire all the bits of information exchanged in a market, so state planning almost always leads to bad results. of course the Austrians got a very different lesson out of this than libcommies.

ps i see that Scott's book is here:
https://libcom.org/files/Seeing%20Like%20a%20State%20-%20James%20C.%20Scott.pdf
but it's 460 pages !

Yeah Scott differentiates himself from the Austrians in that it applies as much to firms in markets as other entities (iirc Austrians don't really have a theory of firms - and Scott's critique applies the moment you realise 'entrepreneurs' don't just magically organise production, but do so through managerial hierarchies etc). Fwiw John O'Neill extends this argument to argue markets also lose this kind of tacit information and know-how, directly engaging Hayek's arguments.

Scott's book is long but good, if a little repetitive (he has loads of case studies, but identifies similar failings in each, so you quickly spot the pattern...) Edit: if you're willing to take his word for it you could probably get away with just reading the intro and conclusion; the chapters in the middle are all about proving the same dynamic occurs from forestry to urban planning to agriculture etc.

thanks joseph.
i also found this about ostrom, which seems to contain a nice summary of her position
https://www.thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.18352/ijc.252/

The Church 'leadership' is mostly service industry, so to speak, it's in function generally not self-serving. This is actually a defined part of its code, and differentiates it from other organisations which tended towards worldly hedonism at the upper levels. Speaking socially, in capitalism it had no particular interest of its own, and mostly just had to cater to what was outside of it or capital, which was represented by the laity. If a capitalist were to be in a Church, then the priests would not be talking down to them, and would be prevented from this. That is how little authority they had, and the rest were mostly just an extension of them, so obviously they were defensive of their own against the outside world. Even Rat-singer, somewhat.

Now, then, other than this you seem to be touching on Marx's point that, in capital, impersonal and unconscious forces were at the centre of the system, and despite it being in truth a human system, humanity was made an object of unconscious forces, as in personal life of instincts, etc. In that sense, there was nothing, or no idea or ideal or thought, at the centre of the system, so saying that this then acted as a 'person,' would be misleading, and supporting it thoroughly impossible without a thorough abrogation of humanity and individuality in favour of other forces, such as the instinctive, social, and so on. However, this was obviously an analysis of capitalism as a mode of production, and Marx does not have much to say about 'institutions' in general, or abstracted from their social context. Generally, institutions under capital which were not explicitly against capital - of course - would try to imitate the forms of capitalist formations in a somewhat bastardised way, or alternatively would have to abrogate this in order to remain as they are and in a niche which can't be so integrated. Capital would generally be more comfortable with stirring up resentment against such non-integrated institutions in order to force them to cater to its own mores, external to them, but otherwise might have been less concerned about them.