Synchronization Costs in the Organizational Society: Intermediary Relational Infrastructures in the Dynamics of Multilevel Networks

Abstract

This chapter provides a theoretical framework for the sociological study of the dynamics of multilevel networks. It looks at the organizational society as a class society in which the distribution of resources has to be specified at the meso level, where individual destinies depend, in part, on their capacities to use power through organizations as “tools with a life of their own” (Selznick P, Leadership in administration. Row, Peterson & Co., Evanston, 1957). Multilevel structures are defined as different but interdependent superposed levels of organized collective agency evolving each at their own rhythms and raising issues of costs of synchronization between the temporalities of these different levels. The notion of cost of synchronization is proposed to account for the efforts spent by actors at each level to structure the other level so as to reshape their constraints and opportunities and thus redefine the terms of this synchronization of temporalities. The main cost of interest with respect to these efforts is defined in terms of creation or maintenance of relational infrastructures, i.e. social forms in a Simmelian sense, such as social status and social niches, at an intermediary level providing leverage for actors involved in such ‘cross-level’ structuration. Organized mobility and relational turnover, as created by multilevel structures and the synchronization of their different temporalities, are construed as context for social processes helping members manage dilemmas of collective action that characterize the organizational society. Empirical examples are provided following the ‘multilevel spinning top model’ of synchronization as well as implications for the study of the emergence of corporate entities, institutions, and social inequalities.