At the beginning of 1999 I wrote an essay entitled The Future for Large Organisations during a week working on my Master’s Thesis at Stockholm University’s School of Business. At the time I believed it to be 25-years ahead of its time as I found no one with whom I could discuss the ideas. Five years ago I included the paper in my Radical Consultation Workshop on Work and Human Fulfilment. It was again ignored. But on this occasion I assumed that although it may have been 25-years ahead of the Perception of Reality it was only 5-years ahead of Reality Itself.

Two years ago I associated the essay with Schumacher’s thinking on Organisation & Size and submitted the 2500-word article to Fourth World Review. But it was outside the editor’s 19th century frame of reference and so it remains unpublished and undiscussed. I will be returning to this Old Research on Diasporas & Jigsaws in my Thursday 7th December blog. But for the moment here is my concluding paragraph…with its deferential nod to E.F. Schumacher.

‘There is much more work to be done before this Rise & Fall of Large Organisations can be defended academically, but this is the hypothesis I am muddling ahead with for the time being. And I would argue that the five principles expounded by Schumacher in his essay on the theory of large scale organisations will be relevant to a theory of large-scale organisation whichever form that large organisation might take because they seek to address that most neglected factor of the theoretician the factor of scale. The practical man can never ignore it of course because nothing works unless it is taken into account. This is how Schumacher ended his essay.

‘Many of us have been struggling for years with the problems presented by large-scale organisation, problems which are becoming ever more acute. To struggle more successfully, we need a theory, built up from principles. But from where do the principles come? They come from observation and practical understanding. The best formulation of the necessary interplay of theory and practice that I know of comes from Mao Tse-tung. Go to the practical people, he says, and learn from them: then synthesise their experience into principles and theories; and then return to the practical people and call upon them to put these principles and methods into practice so as to solve their problems and achieve freedom and happiness.’

Recorded Remittances between families and within clans are running at $250 billion per year…equal to Foreign Direct Investment and double Official Government Aid. Unrecorded Remittances are in the same range. No wonder the banks are looking to service this money flow. Global Statisticians have no idea how to count this and produce Diaspora Accounts…although Multinational Companies have accounting practices to avoid double counting.

The Real World is one where webs of personal, family, ethnic and religious bonds are being woven across the Earth’s oceans…between the Old Communities in the Old Land World and the New Pioneer Townships and Cities Dwellers in the New World that grew up at the end of the Water Ocean Trade Routes. This complex lacework animates and inspires the invisible…but immensely strong…personal bonds and tribal loyalties between the various parts of each clan in each of the cities around their ocean. Until very recently this web was primarily a support system for the new migrant or for the old or the returning triumphant migrant of an earlier migration. But not any more.

The world is moving once more into a period of relative geo-stability on a new and expanded scale and at a new and expanded pace. The Nation State within the World Empires was never a sustainable myth. It was too far divorced from Real Life. But the Local Life within the Tribal Community and the experience over a lifetime of a number of local lives within the same tribal community geographically dispersed around your own Ocean World and located in a number of city regions around that world. This is no myth.

In Birmingham as Number One I predicted that the next thirty years would see a return to ‘the personal in business’. ‘The Personal Business,’ I explained, ‘will not be Local Business it will be Ocean Business conducted on the basis of trust and Personal Ties between friends and family in their tribal communities in their City Regions. Business will return to the Personal Style of the Mercantile Era. The way of Business will be the way of the Merchant Adventurers of a former age. The Commercial Empires of the Seven Ocean World of Tomorrow will be Ethnic Businesses and their purpose will not be unending profit but civilisation for them and theirs.’