# The Organization as a Social Institution By:: [[Ross Jackson]] 2024-09-30 Legally, corporations are people. This is absurd. Corporations are not people. People are people. Corporations are entities created by people. Within corporations are organizations, which are also created by people. Organizations can be understood as social institutions. Organizations shape and constrain human behavior. Norms are established. Various degrees of conformity are enacted. Through conformity, people seek protection and reward. Given layoffs and downsizings, the sense of protection achieved through conformity is illusory. The reward aspect has a problematic twist. If one simply defines reward as something more than normal, the organization can and frequently does provide that. However, if one defines reward as something that exceeds one’s value, it is doubtful that organizations give rewards any more than they provide protection. Given the labor relations, workers are always paid less than the value of their labor. In short, they are exploited. Any bonus, regardless of size, will not likely be near the value appropriated from the exploitive labor practice. When paid, the bonus seems like a benefit. And while making more money is nearly always welcome, the fact that a “bonus” is paid betrays that the worker has been exploited. Rest assured, executives are not doing with less to pay the worker’s bonuses. The money for the bonus comes from the laborers themselves. Ideology blinds workers to this reality. The news one consumes is bought, sold, and produced by corporations. As are the books, movies, songs, and sports one consumes. It is difficult to acquire information that is unmediated by corporate interest. Our society is divided, but it is divided along lines that largely leave the corporate interests intact. Poor and working-class Republicans have more in common with poor and working-class Democrats than any of these groups has with those in the capitalist class. Treating corporations as people is simply a way to obfuscate reality. Corporations are abstractions of capitalist class interest. Find, share, and discuss what is produced outside corporate interest. That is the most likely place to find the essential insights, and they do everything they can to avoid public disclosure. Corporate interest will readily make what sustains the status quo available, not what is needed to improve the situation for those whose labor they benefit from exploiting. If the information you consume makes you inclined to be angry or fearful of powerless people who are different from you in some manufactured way, ask yourself why your attention is drawn away from those with real power. All it takes to manipulate the masses is to accept unreflectively the paradigm presented to them as true. That acceptance is ideology at work. #### Related Items [[Power]] [[Work]] [[Organization]] [[Capitalism]] [[Class]] [[Insights]] [[Salary]] [[Society]]