ABSTRACT
One of the things that fascinated early thinkers and writers on management was the human propensity to organise. This was, or seemed to be, a universal feature of human civilisation. Everywhere one looked, in business, government, the army, education, religion, science, art, one found organisations. Over the years, scientists have proposed various reasons why we as a species
are so dependent on organisation in order to get things done. Anthropologists remind us that we are descended from apes, which are themselves pack animals; on the plains of East Africa, our remotest ancestors banded together for safety and security and to hunt for food, and later in Egypt and Mesopotamia and the river valleys of ancient China and India they congregated in order to conduct agriculture and begin the working of tools. Sociologists and psychologists have suggested that we create and join organisations because we have a need to communicate and express ourselves, and a need also to validate ourselves by winning the respect of others, which in turn increases our own selfesteem. Some political scientists and historians have argued that organisations are created deliberately by some people who are in pursuit of power over others, and that they are a means of social dominance and control. All of these ideas are summed up at least in part by the Egyptian philo-
sopher and theologian Muhammad ‘Abduh, who was active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Noting that ‘mankind has a natural propensity for community’, ‘Abduh remarked that what sets us apart from other community-building species like bees is our ability to think. Bees know instinctively how to build a hive and proceed to do so without questioning the reasons. People, on the other hand, tend to rationalise and look for other and different ways of doing things. People also face the struggle between the demands of the individual for freedom and the right to do
things one’s own way, and the demands of the community for conformity and the following of mutual rules. ‘Abduh believed that those who can truly function without a community, such as hermits, are very rare. Most of us need community, and the path of wisdom consists in submitting ourselves to the community and following its rules. This, he said, is the true natural order of things.
