Log in
Building the Knowledge Base of Nonprofit Management:
A Searchable Database
Sharing Experience, Conveying Hope: Egalitarian Relations as the Essential Method of Alcoholics Anonymous
Abstract
The predictions of Max Weber's "iron cage" of bureaucracy and
Michels's "iron law of oligarchy" failed to materialize in Alcoholics
Anonymous. AA has maintained an alternative form of
collectivistic-democratic voluntary organization for more than seventy
years. Its organizational form was developed within its first five
years and articulated in its foundational text, Alcoholics Anonymous,
published in 1939. Based on detailed histories of its early years, an
analysis of AA's crucial ingredients suggests that six factors
interacted to avoid the temptations of power money, and
professionalization that would have resulted in a bureaucratic form of
organization or oligarchic leadership. In order to avoid death and to
obtain or maintain abstinence, the desperate cofounders stumbled on
the essential method: egalitarian peers share their lived experiences,
conveying hope and strength to one another. In the context of the
essential method, the two cofounders, from the Midwest and New York
City, held similar spiritual beliefs and practiced a self-reflexive
mode of social experiential learning gained from the Oxford Group, a
nondenominational group that advocated healing through personal
spiritual change; they downplayed their charismatic authority in favor
of consulting with and abiding by the consensus of the group. Adapted
from the source document.
Journal
(2006)
vol17
no2
pages145-161
Categories
-
Nonprofit Service Sectors
-
Self-help Organizations
