All organisations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
An independent restatement of Conquest's second law, from 1989. It carries the same contested status: no agreed empirical test exists, and the mirror-image claim is made from the left by Graeber.
In practice
- A grant-making foundation set up with no stated politics finds, two decades on, that its funding priorities are legible to everyone except its own board.
- A membership body that has never taken a public position is asked to sign a statement, signs it, and discovers it had a position all along.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanations are the same as for Conquest's second law: selection in recruitment and promotion, and mission drift as an organisation's staff acquire commitments distinct from its founding purpose.
- In its favour
- Drift in institutional aims is documented in organisational research, and the fact that the claim was arrived at independently suggests both authors were noticing something.
- Against it
- No agreed empirical test exists, the political labels shift meaning over the period described, and the mirror-image claim is made from the left, which no single directional law can accommodate.
- Standing
- An independent restatement of Conquest's second law, carrying the same contested status.
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- The folklore of office life