The Fight Club
Judy is older now, and the club is much bigger than her gym. The others came up in different traditions: better funded, better cornered, with sparring records, sponsors and thirty years of published results. Several of them found her best move on their own, gave it another name, and can show what it did. She has never trained alongside any of them. This part introduces her to each in turn.
A bibliography, a factory, a coal face, an assembly line, a paper: most chapters in this part open on one of these. Nothing in the scenes is invented, and each is sourced in a note. The scenes in Part One posed a question by showing a future that had already answered it. These show somebody who reached a piece of this book’s argument first, in another vocabulary, and often with better evidence than we have assembled since. They are receipts, and the debt they record is ours.
We come to these literatures as debtors, not competitors. Organization design, hierarchy theory, ecology, sociotechnical systems design and sociocracy, the study of the commons, and holonic manufacturing each converged on components we treat as ours. In most cases they measured what they had, published it, and let others test it; the chapters that follow give the record for each. The part closes with the three published objections that land. They are the ones we have never answered, which are seldom the ones most often quoted at us.
This part asks something different of a reader from Part One, and something harder. Part One asked to be watched. Here the people who use an instrument audit it in use, in that instrument’s vocabulary. A reader outside the tradition may skip the terminology and follow the shape of the charge, which is simple: something has been recommended to clients for decades without, as far as we have been able to find, ever being compared with the alternatives on the same evidence. Anybody can assess a charge of that shape. This is the most technical part of the book, and about a third of its length.
There is a reason to do the accounting now. Most of the questions this book raises are already being worked on elsewhere, in other vocabularies, by fields with data, funding and venues, and without the theory. They will be answered either way; what can still go wrong is that they are answered without us, and that the vocabulary, which does hold something the others have not assembled, is retired before anyone establishes what it was worth. Our own literature does not help. A body of work that has published no results against itself reads as a school rather than as a science, and, in our judgment, is cited accordingly.