Self-Organization Degree and Organizational Mobilization Cost

Based on the definition of mobilization, Organizational mobilization is the process of collecting, processing, managing, and delivering information about individuals’ needs and goals, after which individuals make decisions and execute in a manner they deem acceptable to complete rights conversion.

Mobilization costs primarily arise in three areas:

• Information Management and Distribution: Mobilizers collect information on individuals’ rights transformation goals, analyze, reconstruct, and redistribute it. Mobilizers act as facilitators, and individuals assess the efficiency and form of the rights transformation based on the distributed information. If individuals accept the terms and participate, mobilization is achieved. However, if individuals are dissatisfied with the terms, they may refuse participation, requiring mobilizers to enter the persuasion and education phase.

• Mobilization Persuasion and Education: When mobilizers’ terms fail to attract sufficient participation, they may attempt persuasion and education, akin to sales persuasion, to encourage individuals to reassess value or understand the transformation’s worth through additional details. The greater the gap between terms and individual goals or cognition, the higher the persuasion and education costs.

• Mobilization Management: In some cases, individuals participate but exploit rule loopholes to achieve their goals while harming organizational interests or not fully meeting mobilizers’ objectives. Mobilizers must supervise and manage the rights transformation process to ensure organizational goals are met.

(While restricting individuals’ ability to disengage from the organization could lower mobilization costs, such behavior is strongly opposed under Intelligenism and is not discussed separately.)

In organizations with higher self-organization degrees, tasks such as information collection, distribution, persuasion, education, and rule management are more spontaneously handled by individuals. In a flea market scenario, vendors independently decide their offerings, disclose product information, and communicate with buyers. A management office may set market rules, but vendors monitor their impact and negotiate if they are unfair. In contrast, a top-down supermarket has departments devising unified purchasing and sales plans, with goods owned by a single entity (the supermarket) before sale. Comparing these, the flea market exhibits a higher self-organization degree, while the supermarket has a lower one. Suppose flea market stall rents are set through periodic auctions, and an elected vendor team manages the rules. In that case, the market cedes more responsibility to individuals, thereby further increasing its self-organization degree.

In higher self-organization degree organizations, individuals face greater information and decision-making challenges, necessitating enhanced autonomous information collection, comparison, and decision-making balancing. This reflects a decentralization of the three mobilization cost components (information management, persuasion, education, and management). Higher self-organization degree organizations exhibit reduced retention of rights by core decision-makers and increased allocable rights for most individuals, who also bear more mutual management, persuasion, education, and information disclosure tasks. As individuals assume tasks previously handled by decision-makers, mobilizers’ efforts decrease, reducing mobilization costs. Some mobilization tasks are replaced by individuals’ self-driven motivation, leading to a lower-energy equilibrium state.

Self-organization does not necessarily mean complete decentralization. The final form depends on the external environment and individuals’ states. In some contexts, centralized structures may better fit the environment, leading even highly self-organized organizations to temporarily adopt centralized forms (voluntarily chosen by individuals). Nonetheless, higher self-organization degree organizations can bottom-up determine interactions with the external environment, achieving a more balanced state through continuous self-adjustment. Overall, they exhibit distributed states, devolved decision-making, and lower internal energy consumption compared to lower self-organization degree organizations under similar conditions.