Chapter 13: The Political Dimension of Organizations

Politics is implicit to all types of social community including corporations, organization and networks of organizations. Political management contributes to the possibility for individual emancipation and the development of the social community itself. It uses power and power processes to shape structures, and use these to constrain and facilitate behavior. How it is distributed and used to develop the potential of social communities and at the same time suppress it through forms of structural violence is important to understand, in particular because of its connection with knowledge and information.

In this chapter we explore some rational and ideological aspects of social collectives that will hopefully enable us to understand a bit more the processes that are needed for critical deconstraining. We have also created a political temperament framework that is in itself potentially conceptually critical.