Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
A contested partisan claim about institutional drift, with no agreed empirical test. Graeber's Iron Law of Liberalism advances the mirror-image claim from the left, and neither has been settled.
In practice
- A professional association founded to set technical standards is, thirty years on, issuing position papers on questions its founders would have thought outside its remit.
- A charity's trustees notice that each new appointment shares the assumptions of the last, and nobody can recall the meeting at which a direction was chosen.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanations are selection, in which recruitment and promotion favour those who share the prevailing outlook, and mission drift, in which organisations founded for one purpose acquire staff whose commitments lie elsewhere.
- In its favour
- Drift in the stated aims of institutions is documented in organisational research, and Graeber's Iron Law of Liberalism makes the mirror-image claim from the left, which suggests both are noticing something about how organisations change.
- Against it
- It is a partisan claim with no agreed empirical test, the labels shift meaning over the period being described, and organisations have also drifted in the other direction, which the law does not allow for.
- Standing
- A contested partisan claim about institutional drift with no agreed empirical test. Graeber's Iron Law of Liberalism makes the mirror-image claim from the left.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- The folklore of office life