There are around 50,000 people remaining in the indigenous Kuna tribe in Panama and Colombia. Their history, legends, and laws are communicated through singing and pictographs. The tribe was devastated in the 16th century by rival tribes with superior poison-dart blowgun technology. They live on just a handful of small islands despite having beautiful, unspoiled land all around. Until just a few years ago, the Kuna used coconuts for money.
It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that the Kuna are a dying people, hapless primitives in the modern world, and in some ways this is true. Their families are getting smaller, and their children are leaving for employment and opportunities on the mainland. The Kuna are by no means ascendant.
Yet, underestimating them would be a bad move. In addition to being shrewd business people, the Kuna are tough negotiators and avid legislators. Among their accomplishments just in recent years are collective price controls for produce, legal limits on ownership and tourism of their lands, and a thriving business in the sale of molas, the traditional Kuna dress. The tribe has a collective decision-making process, and the authority of its chiefs is recognized by the Panamanian government. Anachronistic though they might seem, in organizational terms the Kuna are far from primitive.
Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel has a great deal to say about human societies in general and the geneses and advantages of organizations in particular. In describing the four types of societies–bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states–Diamond also describes the necessary conditions for the modern organization. Taken together, they represent the path from hunter-gatherer to the human resources department.
Diamond’s description of a band comes closest to describing an absence of organization. In this first step of complexity, hunter-gatherers, usually nomadic and related, have almost none of the trappings of organization and almost all of the challenges of lone survival. Their collective presence is small, and there are currently very few left on the planet.
The tribe comes closer to what would look familiar to us. Tribes tend to be more stationary, leadership begins to emerge, and the collective is more numerous. A class system denoting rank may be evident, and the transition from hunter-gatherer to some food production is common. Make no mistake, though–the tribe is still a pretty harsh and dangerous way of life.
As tribes and communities are conquered and merged, numbers and complexity mark the appearance of the chiefdom. Where bands and tribes seemed fairly lawless and free, chiefdoms mark the beginnings of centralized decision authority, class structure, centralized conflict resolution, and even some division of labor. Egalitarianism gives way to rank, and bureaucracy may emerge.
Of the four types of societies, nearly everyone reading this book will likely have lived only in a state (those who have lived in bands of hunter-gatherers and learned to read, please drop me an e-mail). We recognize the state in our large numbers, central leadership, multilevel bureaucracies, laws, taxes, literacy, and division of labor–that is, our jobs. States build highways and bridges, make laws and police the populace, collect taxes and invest in health care and defense, all in ways of which at least some of their constituents disapprove. Perhaps the most telling sign of how far the state is from the band is that people in a state can hunt for fun.
In its way, each successive type of society reflects the maturation of organizations. All are social arrangements, each seeks increasingly complex common goals, membership in each is increasingly formalized, and performance is more rigidly controlled in each. Yet, the organization as we understand it today is predicated upon a society reaching the level of a state. It is the formalization and complexity of a state-level society that enables the formalization and complexity we observe in our modern organizations. Logically, one would expect that an organization’s complexity would not exceed the complexity of the society within which it exists. For example, it seems highly unlikely that the indigenous Kuna tribe of Panama could create a Microsoft (and equally unlikely that Bill Gates would know where to find Udud Bungid to treat a snakebite).
Why does this matter? Well, aside from the obvious point that bands don’t need a human resources department to interview potential hunter-gatherers, the relationship between societies and the kinds of organizations they can support gives us a couple of insights.
First is the obvious matter of history: by having a way to talk about how societies and organizations evolved, we also have a way to discuss how they came to be as they are now. We can agree or disagree about how that history happened, but at least we have it there to discuss.
Second and more relevant to our current discussion, we can make some educated guesses about the organizations we observe by also observing the societies within which they operate. It is a fair assumption that Apple Computer, based in California and operating within an increasingly global society, will exhibit more complexity than a homegrown computer company in Yemen. A current example is India’s trade liberalization and the accompanying explosion in its high tech industry. While the Kuna represent some surprisingly advanced modes of organization, it would seem logical that the societal environment creates the conditions that give rise to greater organizational complexity.
Understanding where organizations came from should give us some idea of where they are today and where they might be headed. The Kuna are probably doomed as a society. Ultimately, though, the gift of the Kuna and of the bands, tribes, and chiefdoms that have given rise to today’s complex states is a history and a path that we can understand and discuss.
