Cadre Down, Autonomous Group Up

October 27th, 2007 Posted in Group, Cadre, Cadre Functions

Consider the ubiquity of the cadre function. It includes all activities and processes that contribute to a group’s unity in action. Can think of it as the forms of governance:

(1) legislative: what to do and how to do it

(2) executive: mobilization and co-ordination, the who, when and where of the doing

(3) judicial: evaluation and review of the results.

The group does not act, its members do. They are the group’s agents. This diversity of actors and wills makes the cadre functions necessary. Without it we are off in all directions.

I propose a universal judicial test for cadres. (It is based on value but remember that we are not a hard science).

(1) Fidelity to task based on honest service and acceptance of imposed limits.

(2) Competence. willing and able to perform the required duties.

(3) Congruence of goals and methods with those supported by the membership of the group served.

(4) Wisdom to find the unifying and equitable way when the group is riven by contradictions and conflicts.

Ordinarily in situations of established usage and within an acceptable range of comfort, the cadre system in place works and continues. But on certain occasions either the process does not provide the function or it generates a cost that is onerous to the membership.

(1) The cadre in place falls below grade in its judicial tests. It proves faithless and instead of serving the purposes of the group it follows alternative goals–

–Ego central. Cadre steals the cash, inflates self (vanity), collects a harem.

–Serves an alien ideology. Allegations of the false tzar, the false pope, the president captured by special interests. The congruence between cadre and group purpose is broken.

–Serves a kinship or family interest. (With Napoleon we had both an exaggerated egoism and family nepotism)

–Serves a criminal syndicate.

(2) A crisis, natural or man-made, to which the cadre in place can not responde in whole or in part.

In other words the ordinary cadre functions are in disarray. In this transitional time the group is challenged to become autonomous, for itself against defective cadre. The stark alternatives for the members: save the group or save self. Maintain the group identity and solidarity or act for the self alone or with perhaps a small remnant. (The ship sinking, the captain orders it abandoned and the word goes out “every man for himself.” Agency gone, the group gone.

And the third way. The catch-all combo. Accept reduced group function. Act for self as necessary and possible.

Sorry to call out the demons but sociology is not all sunshine and roses. We can’t come close to understanding the group and its processes without considering it under stress and threatened with dissolution.

So we have to ask the question of the group’s resources to act for itself when the established cadre has gone south?