"Any great organization can go through sectarian phases"
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Every institution that grows large enough eventually gets tempted by purity. Mary Douglas, the anthropologist who made her name by mapping how societies police “dirt,” danger, and taboo, compresses a whole sociology of office politics into one cool sentence. “Great organization” sounds like competence and scale, but Douglas reminds you that bigness doesn’t immunize a group from becoming a church.
The phrase “sectarian phases” is doing the real work. It implies cycles: moments when an organization stops defining itself by what it produces and starts defining itself by what it excludes. The subtext is diagnostic, not merely descriptive. When complexity rises and authority feels threatened, factions simplify the world into insiders and heretics. Procedure turns into ritual. Disagreement becomes moral failure. The organization’s internal boundary-maintenance starts to matter more than the external mission.
Douglas’s intent is also quietly deflationary: sectarianism isn’t a freak accident caused by “bad actors,” it’s a predictable cultural response to stress. That’s classic Douglas, whose grid-group theory tracks how communities oscillate between tight solidarity and looser, more plural arrangements. Calling it a “phase” strips it of romantic heroism and permanent doom alike. Phases pass, but not without cost.
Context matters: Douglas wrote in the shadow of mid-century bureaucracy, decolonization, and the Cold War, when institutions sold themselves as rational machines while behaving, often, like anxious tribes. Read now, it lands just as cleanly on political parties, universities, tech companies, even scientific fields: the moment the boundary becomes the product, sects appear.
The phrase “sectarian phases” is doing the real work. It implies cycles: moments when an organization stops defining itself by what it produces and starts defining itself by what it excludes. The subtext is diagnostic, not merely descriptive. When complexity rises and authority feels threatened, factions simplify the world into insiders and heretics. Procedure turns into ritual. Disagreement becomes moral failure. The organization’s internal boundary-maintenance starts to matter more than the external mission.
Douglas’s intent is also quietly deflationary: sectarianism isn’t a freak accident caused by “bad actors,” it’s a predictable cultural response to stress. That’s classic Douglas, whose grid-group theory tracks how communities oscillate between tight solidarity and looser, more plural arrangements. Calling it a “phase” strips it of romantic heroism and permanent doom alike. Phases pass, but not without cost.
Context matters: Douglas wrote in the shadow of mid-century bureaucracy, decolonization, and the Cold War, when institutions sold themselves as rational machines while behaving, often, like anxious tribes. Read now, it lands just as cleanly on political parties, universities, tech companies, even scientific fields: the moment the boundary becomes the product, sects appear.
Quote Details
| Topic | Leadership |
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