Managing the Tribe of Tribes

In response to my Tribal Affiliations and Value post, Ed Vielmetti wrote:

Jim -

When I think about this, I think of a couple different kinds of tribes.

Some tribes are exclusive. You gain membership through some difficult initiation ritual, or by virtue of birth. Outsiders are shunned, or at least kept at a distance, and there are secrets within the group which are not even hinted at by others.

Other tribes are acquisitive, always looking for new members. You are recruited to the tribe, and you are expected to recruit others to the tribe. Outsiders as seen as the not yet converted, or the not yet evangelized.

Somehow these two approaches are different enough that I think they have to fit into this discussion, but I don't know how yet.

I think that you can quickly build a matrix of tribal attributes that make up a pastiche of potential tribal types.

I could see that tribes may be:

• Open / Accessible / Penetratable / Willfully Closed / Functionally Closed
• Secretive / Neutral / Demonstrative
• Based on Dogma / Activity / Fear

And probably others.  But let me break down these types first and see how many others we can come up with later.

Openness

• Open - Completely Open, anyone can join.  The Democrats or Republicans are completely open membership wise.
• Accessible - You can join but there is some cost involved.  The YMCA might be this type of organization.  A church might also.  In general, you need to have some belief to be a member.
• Penetratable - A higher barrier of entry.  This is like becoming a recognized academic, Olympian or lawyer.  It's hard to get in, but the steps are clear to get there.
• Willfully Closed - This is a tribe you can't join because the group wants it that way.  Upper management and rock bands would be in this category.
• Functionally Closed - This is a tribe you can't join because you simply cannot be a member of that group.  I simply cannot be a Black woman.  George Bush is not going to be a Chinese gardener.

Information

• Secretive - Some tribes maintain specific secrets to maintain group cohesion and as a benefit for membership.  In the days of guilds, this was the way that organizations controlled quality and fixed prices.  The Masons and the Marines use it as a right of passage.  The Mormon church uses it to punctuate the sacred.
• Neutral - Some tribes are formed with no desire to control information at all.  Softball organizations just play softball.
• Demonstrative - Some tribes have a mission of distributing information as quickly as possible.  Greenpeace or the National Right To Life Organization would fall into this camp. 

Philosophy

• Dogma - Some tribes are based on a type of Dogma.  That can be religious, but it can also be professional.  When HMOs were growing quickly in the US, health care professionals joined organizations to fight HMOs on dogmatic grounds. 
• Activity - Some tribes are based on an action.  Again softball.
• Fear - Tribes often form around fear.  People band together for comfort and reassurance.  Groups fighting Gay Marriage would be the poster child for this camp, but almost every other group has some elements of response to a perceived threat.

I have used national, established groups as examples because they are things we can all recognize.  The point, however, is that in daily life we naturally use these elements to quickly establish ad-hoc tribes to deal with life's constant challenges.

Tribes can be ad hoc

In high school it was time for confirmation classes at church.  I wasn't getting the whole Catholic thing.  Everyone would line up in church and say the things at the proper times, but didn't follow through upon exiting the church.

They didn't follow their tribal responsibilities and the tribe did nothing to encourage them to do so. 

This left me feeling little value for the tribe.

So I went through Confirmation classes.  I wanted to find the value in the tribe, so I studied very hard.

Each day we'd have a bible bowl, it was boys against girls every time.  Apparently it was a gender specific tribal imperative. 

The boys would always win because I was on the team and was studying so hard.  "It's not fair he's on your team!" The girls would say.  The boys were thrilled that I was on their team because ... the boys always got creamed otherwise.  I was an ad hoc tribal asset.

I remember the boys getting more and more rowdy.  Screaming and jumping up and down and carrying on when I'd answer a question and the team would get a point. 

But we were a boy tribe against a girl tribe in a catholic tribe that in the end didn't really value its members anyway.  So, the benefits I received for being a boy tribe member didn't extend beyond the church door.  The tribe was entirely ad hoc.

Later, at school, all boy-tribal benefits were irrelevant.

Ad Hoc Tribes, People, and Tribal Elements

Ad hoc tribes are still made up of people who are gathering in response to something, doing something, and controlling their membership.  And (here we go again) the makeup of this cocktail is based on the value needs of the individuals controlling the ad hoc groups.  Their fears, their needs become expressed in the tribes which form to protect them, achieve a goal or fix a problem.

((The picture of St. Leo's Catholic Church in Grand Island, Nebraska, is after their recent renovation.  When I went, it was sort of cabin-like.  Wood beams, carpet.  Very 1970s.  Now it looks rather institutional and cold, I should stop by some day and see it first hand.))

Technorati Tags: us and them, tribes, management, sociology, st leos, catholicism, catholic, right to life, ymca, confirmation classes

Comments

[Dave]

"When two tribes go to war a point is all you can score"

sorry, i couldn't resist that

[Jay Fienberg]

I like the idea of your tribe types matrix, but I think "openness" is really an aggregate index, rather than an attribute, like your information and philosophy dimensions.

One way to think about this is that a tribe is essentially a kind of non-human person. And, like human individuals, tribes enter into relationships both intentionally and through circumstance. And tribes have histories that are inconsistent, e.g., sharing today, secretive tomorrow, etc.

So, we could look at a tribe as being "open" in the way we might look at a person being "open": both their intentions and their practice are factors.

Also, one way to think of all of the attributes you've described is as existing on a timeline. For example, "dogma" is a trend in time. So, one might ask: is the tribe becoming more or less defined by dogma.

[Edward Vielmetti]

There's a set of choices I run through when looking at groups, based on some work by Bob Parnes at UMich (his dissertation on Confer).

You break down groups (in this case online conferences) three ways:

Open vs closed: do you need permission to join, or can you just join.

Permanent vs temporary: is the group designed to last, or does it have some predetermined end date.

Broad vs. narrow: is there some topical focus which everything revolves around, or does anything go.

and then look at the combinations to see what you get.

The time-duration of the group is important, and I think one reason why people tend to get online things wrong. It can be really helpful to construct a temporary scaffolding to absorb the energy of a closed group of people with a narrow focus for a short while. If you really want to build for a long future there are things you do differently.

[Edward Vielmetti]

did you start reading "us and them" before writing this or after?

[Jim Benson]

Thanks guys,

Yes, I read Berreby's book around the time I started writing these. Or immediately before. But my thinking about these things started years ago as an Urban Planning student.

Why did certain neighborhoods become cohesive and close while others did not? Why did certain school districts "self-correct"? And many similar questions always left me frustrated.

The simple blame-driven reasons didn't work for me. "Parents are more involved" or "People don't care" etc.

In the 80s and 90s, group dynamics focused on strong behavioristic models which I really disliked. Again, they focused on blame and not on action.

Recent theories are more in line with my thinking - that social objects (and we as individuals are) fundamentally change with both context and construction. Over time, things change and responding to change is a primary feature of success.