It's the meso level, stupid! Multilevel relational dynamics in a world of organizations

This book proposes a neo-structural approach to studying the organizational society as multilevel stratigraphies, both intra and inter-organizational, framing collective action. Such stratigraphies make visible an often invisibilized dimension of the verticality of society, along with class and occupational macro-structures. So far, organizational society combined routines, impersonal, and hierarchical bureaucracies for mass production with collegial pockets of rival peers relying on deliberation and personalized relational infrastructures for collective innovation. Both models combine as stratigraphic levels jointly enabling institutional change (also called “joint regulation”). Top-down collegiality and bottom-up collegiality complemented the default model of bureaucratic control, introducing dynamic stabilization at the organizational, meso level of society. Vertical linchpins and cross-level forms of division of work try to manage to link-level temporalities and take advantage of new opportunities and synchronization costs across levels. The digitalization of society has pushed forward the bureaucratic control currently trying to neutralize bottom-up collegiality with inside-out collegiality (the external monitoring of personalized relational infrastructures and oppositional solidarities of innovative collective action). Military swarm templates (organized platoons making contextual decisions on the ground of battlefields with the aid of external AI monitoring and all sorts of sensors) exemplify this drift towards an organizational, discreet form of totalitarianism -- and possibly the end of democracy, and the ability of people to change institutions, if no new counter-powers are created to balance powers of the new AI-boosted Big Relational Tech platforms enabling the spread of inside-out collegiality. Cooperatives, collective entrepreneurship, attempts to create new kinds of commons such as community organizing or P2P professions using open-source technologies may oppose this tendency as locally resistant forms of bottom up collegiality.