Structure vs. Culture

"One cheer for democratic culture; another for democratic structure; three cheers when they join together in collaboration."

~Anonymous

"Strulture”?

A new (or overlooked) relationship demands a new term: A “strulture” is a collaborative and mutually enhancing relationship between structure and culture. This relationship obtains, e.g., where:

A “democratic structure” (larger scale institutions and patterns of governance) and a “democratic culture” (attitudes and commitments at the local, grassroots, or inter-personal level) mirror each other, support and protect each other, and contribute to the overall accessibility, inclusiveness, growth, and strength of workplace/economic democracy.

Positive Examples

1. Mondragon’s reconstruction of democratic membership to include being an “empressario”, or a developer of new cooperatives. (See "The Challenge of Mondragon" by George Benello and Caitlin Quigley's recent report from her trip to Spain)
2. DAWN’s peer-2-peer program which enables grassroots practitioners to help shape the overall worker co-op community.
3. The Lucas Plan, in which workers themselves, through identifying their own skills, passions, and aspirations, construct a fall-back new enterprise plan in case their current workplace becomes unsustainable.
4. The former Yugoslavian system of “self-management” in which elected officials, in general, are “delegates”, readily recalled and required to continue working and/or residing, at least part-time, in the very communities or workplaces that elected them.
5. The original Porto Alegre form of the participatory budget, in which public officials are required to enable citizens and citizen-driven organizations to shape how and where their tax revenues are used.

Negative Examples (where the absence of one undermines the other)

1. El Pollo Criollo (EPC): Here a support organization (Federation for Economic Democracy, forerunner of the ICA Group) assisted laid off workers in taking over a defunct chicken processing plant using a genuinely democratic structure that gave them controlling numbers on the firm’s Board.  But this structure, by itself, had nothing to offer them when EPC was forced to close due to underhanded competitive pricing by a multi-national chicken processing corporation.  Why not? Because the workers had not been empowered to design ways to continue working together, or even separately, should their enterprise go under.  A good structure was not enough.
2. Central CT Middle School (not its actual name): In this case, a group of graduate and undergraduate students under my coordination convinced a middle school principal to allow us to facilitate study circle workshops with his seventh graders.  These focused on enabling the younger students to discuss in a open and dialogical way what they were learning, to assess it, and make recommendations to improve or reshape their own classroom experience.  It worked wonderfully well for over two years, but began to fall apart at the beginning of the next year.  Despite the principal’s support, he had been overruled by a newly hired Superintendent, who decreed that subjects other than the core math, science, social studies, and English were to be verboten, as of the next semester.  Hearing about this, the students became enraged at the loss of their art and music, as well as study circle courses, and many of them cut classes or became unruly in them.

In this case, we had managed to begin building a very close and empowering culture, one where the students could feel their own voices were heard and their talents appreciated.  But we poured all our time and energy into that, and totally neglected the structural or larger institutional context, failing to reach out (until too late) to our students’ parents or to other teachers and teacher organizations to create allies.  And, also, failing to look for potential support among outside allied organizations, such as Everyday Democracy – which is located in our state and had pioneered the use of citizen dialogue to resolve community problems – for assistance with the School District and its administration.  We were blind-sighted institutionally, despite our astonishing success in building a democratic culture.

Lessons? – and an Example

Perhaps “culture” and “structure” are not invariably separate, contrasting, clashing, etc. If so, advocating that either one trumps the other might be better replaced by seeking “culture-enhancing structures” and “structure-enhancing cultures”.

We could try seeing the relationship here as analogous to that between the lyrics and melodies of a song. If one or the other is totally missing, you don’t have a song at all. If one is present but under-developed (schmaltzy or clichéd, for example), this weakens or degrades the whole song. And, if one overshadows or dominates the other, this will have the same result.

Beyond this, for a really great song, you need lyrics that resonate with, reinforce, enrich the melodies, and vice-versa. This is way more than merely fitting into the time spans or matching the sound strength (loud vs. soft) of one another. It calls for something akin to an art of collaboration.

One really fine example of this art is a process designed by poet, librarian, and writing mentor Wendy DeGroat, which she calls the “Kiva Feedback Ladder”.  Though originally designed as a mentoring guide, I think it can be readily applied to a host of other situations, including ones involving conflicts between individuals, organizations, loyalties, ideologies, etc. As such, it could help turn aggressive antagonists into collaborative allies.

Wendy sent me a pdf version of her ladder (see below), which is adapted from other writing mentor guidelines, e.g., Harvard’s Project Zero.  Here’s a question about it you might want to ask yourself: Shoud the Kiva Feedback Ladder be counted as an instance of “democratic structure”, or as one of “a democratic culture”; or should it rather be understood as a “democratic strulture” – playing a role in, and combining aspects of, both structure and culture?