So I’m starting to think about the 119 and its organizational design. Starting to pickup more concretely literature in this area. It seems to me that looking at the 119 as a case connects to literature from the following areas like:
- Organizational Studies
- Business Management and Leadership
- Collectives and Cooperatives
- Grassroots Organizing
- Volunteer Management
- Motivational Studies
- Social Network Theory
- Complexity Studies
- System Thinking
- Network Design
This format rests within a long history of community action and engagement coupled with traditions coming out of the business sector formed during the middle part of the last century and then amplified by advances in science and technology which have produced new ways of sharing and communicating.
The 119 sits somewhere between social network theory and organizational management theories. The organization is concerned with organizational tasks such as creating goals and outcomes, designing roles and responsibility / accountability, and coordinating and communicating key information (management and leadership). At the same time, there is a need for trust, community, reciprocity, social bonding and bridging (social network). The system also mechanisms to provide feedback for adaptation and response (system).
Thinking too on what self-organizing groups need in terms of platforms, coordinating structures, values, etc.
It also seems to me that the 119 Gallery responds and adapts within a context of problem-based organization. Laurie Ross’s report on Youth Workers talks about Dilemna-based approaches. It seems that there is something there. The idea that problems become and opportunity respond and adapt systems.
For instance, current tensions at the 119 appear to revolve around roles and responsibilities and confusion when these are crossed without prior understanding.
I’m going to start reading on some older literature from the early 1990s to early 2000s about these concepts. I am thinking that while the business sector has had a lot of these ideas shifting around and there exist NPO models, articulation of these concepts within the NPO literature is under-developed.