Businesses don\u2019t seem to have any long\u2013term goals apart from staying in business. They no doubt provide benefits to their shareholders and executives during their lifetime but why they aim at persisting in their existence with little reflection devoted to the \u201cwhy?\u201d of it is far from obvious. There is a clear analogy here with people and groups of people who \u2013 as we know from experience – persist in their endeavors without often much of a justification for why.<\/p>\n
An analogy can be drawn here with a particular form of kinship structure which the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins explained in a 1961 paper called \u00ab The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion \u00bb (*). In that paper, Sahlins described the segmentary lineage, a type of kinship structure often encountered in African traditional societies, where the lineage\u2019s head strategy consists in invading the environment with his progeny of which he tries to maximize the number. As the paper\u2019s subtitle made clear, Sahlins labeled the segmentary lineage, \u201can organization of predatory expansion.\u201d The choice of the term \u201cpredatory\u201d was however infelicitous as – although there is no accompanying social organization in these cases – this type of strategy is resorted to by animal populations which the field of \u201cpopulation dynamics\u201d characterizes with the less dramatic and more adequate phrase of \u201ccolonizing behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n
Colonizing behavior is perfectly adapted to relatively unpopulated environments and it allows in particular a speedy expansion of life-forms. The African environments that Sahlins had in mind \u2013 I can testify to this \u2013 fitted that description and the label \u201ccolonizing\u201d was much more apt therefore than the excessive \u201cpredatory\u201d that Sahlins used instead. <\/p>\n
Things change radically though once the environment which was the theater of such \u201ccolonizing\u201d strategies becomes more densely populated. Just as with segmentary lineages, businesses within the capitalist system have no other long-term aim than their survival for an unlimited period of time. With lineages, the expansion strategy covers an ever increasing part of the environment and the resources it holds. The same with businesses, measuring the success of their strategy in terms of \u201cmarket share.\u201d With the segmentary lineage, the beneficiaries are its family members, its chiefs in particular. Similarly with businesses: the beneficiaries are their shareholders and even more so, their executives. <\/p>\n
Within densely populated environments, the widening influence of a lineage over a territory or of a business over a market share allows that group to crowd out competition and to trend towards the optimal power balance in its view: that of a monopoly situation where the relationship with counterparties knows no constraint and the terms when dealing with them can properly be \u201cdictated.\u201d <\/p>\n
A \u201ccolonizing\u201d policy as I said allows life-forms to spread in no time within relatively unoccupied environments. However it first grows inadequate then plainly detrimental as the population\u2019s density increases. Indeed, in crowded surroundings, the sole long-term goal shared by both segmentary lineages and businesses of ensuring their unlimited survival in time, end up in an unfettered war of all against all. <\/p>\n
Ensuring one\u2019s unlimited survival in time is the typical aim that nature left to its own devices assigns by default to every type of population. In reverse, within a nature which Man has domesticated to render it less harsh to his own fate, such aim needs to be reexamined due to its disposition to end up in disaster in environments which have ceased benefiting from further efforts at colonization. This conclusion applies no doubt to segmentary lineages but even more so to businesses. The time has come for them to assign themselves humanly significant aims to supplant the by now dysfunctional one which nature had assigned it by default. <\/p>\n
(*) Sahlins, Marshall D., “The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion,” American Anthropologist<\/em>, April 1961, Vol. 63(2): 322-344.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Businesses don\u2019t seem to have any long\u2013term goals apart from staying in business. They no doubt provide benefits to their shareholders and executives during their lifetime but why they aim at persisting in their existence with little reflection devoted to the \u201cwhy?\u201d of it is far from obvious. There is a clear analogy here with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-economy","category-human-complex-systems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pauljorion.com\/blog_en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}