Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing through Other Patterns

by Nora Bateson

An institution is made of people, each with their own biographies, and it exists within community, culture and, ultimately, the natural world. Margaret Mead noted the African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” Indeed, the responsibility for the world the child grows to understand lies in the collective impressions that the village provides. In the same way, the behavior of institutions lies in the contextual expectations and valuations of each organization’s relationships within the larger community, as well as at the level of each employee. This is a tricky set of boundaries to draw, influenced at meta levels by lurking habits of thinking that tend to individuate. The responsibility is in the village, and the way the village interacts with its institutions. In the same way, the institutions interact with each other to form the linking zone where the blending of culture, economy and education happens. In our dissatisfaction with the behavior of our institutional or corporate organizations, we, the village, with our wish for ‘change,’ may feel impotent. Politics, business, law, education, medicine, and media are all substantiating each other. Politics needs business to thrive, education is the link to employment and scientific importance, medicine and law try to support both the political and personal codes of health and justice in respect to business and governmental policy. We cannot after all vote on the board or rewrite corporate policy from the sidelines. ...