The Old Order Amish Steering Committee: A Case Study in Organizational Evolution

The founding of the Old Order Amnish Steering Committee provides an unusual opportunity to identify environmental factors that may pressure collectivities to fonnally organize. Arnish communities, despite a nornative stance antithetical to central authority and hierarchy, felt compelled to create a national organization as the best means of effectively articulating their views to a proliferating array of government bureaucracies. The Amish's perceived need to create the Steering Commtittee makes clear that the legal environment may be coercive independent of the substantive character of particular laws. The mere pervasiveness of government standards, codes, regulations, and programs forces collectivities subject to them to adopt bureaucratic structures. The Steering Committee's evolution confirms the pervasiveness and decisiveness of the legal infrastructure, features only sporadically appreciated in the organizational literature. The genesis of an organization creates special opportunities for the social scientist, particularly when the organization in question emerges de novo from a relatively undifferentiated congeries of rural communities. Such milieus are rapidly disappearing into the realm of history. If the bureaucratization of the world is not complete, it has at least left few unrationalized enclaves. Consequently, the appearance in 1966 of an embryonic bureaucracy known as the Old Order Amish Steering Committee merits examination, providing an unusual opportunity to identify, in a contemporary setting, the environmental factors militating for initial adoption of formal organizational structure. A study of the evolution of the Steering Committee also confirms the pervasive character of the legal infrastructure and its decisive role both in initiating bureaucratization and shaping the structure and process of existing organizations. Laws, regulatory groups, and political systems were identified as discrete elements of organizational environments even by early proponents of what Aldrich and Marsden (1988:375) refer to as environmental contingency theory (see, e.g., Schein 1965:89; Stinchcombe 1965:142; Thompson 1967:28). But it was another ten years before organizational theorists began a systematic explication *My sincere thanks to the staff of Herrick Memorial Library and to Dean Chris Grontkowski for her suipport. Direct correspondence to Marc A. Olshan at thle Division of Social Science, Alfred University, Alfred, NY 14802. ? The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, December 1990, 69(2):603-616 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 06:08:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 604 / Social Forces 69:2, December 1990 of the impact of these elements. More recently the legal environment has been presented as being of paramount importance in relation to other environmental sectors: "Indeed, the state must be the major force affecting organizational formation in the twentieth centuly" (Aldrich 1979:164; emphasis in original). Perrow has come to see that "the power of the state to regulate and disburse entitlements is probably the single most important means of controlling an environment" (1986:190). Study of the Steering Committee helps reveal one facet of the legal environment's primacy that has not been adequately appreciated. Its potency what might plausibly be called its coerciveness does not derive solely from its being backed by the power of the state. Nor does it depend on the substantive character of specific laws, i.e., that they may be unfair, oppressive, and intrusive. It derives rather from the pervasiveness of the legal infrastructure. Laws may be coercive in that they force collectivities that are subject to them to adopt bureaucratic structures iff they are to survive, a consequence that is as unintentional as it is universal. The evolution of the Steering Committee provides a telling confirmation of this pressure to bureaucratize not only because of its recency (and hence its accessibility to research) but also because Amish' communities share a normative stance distinctly antithetical to organization. Amish Antipathy to Organization The Old Order Amish stand out on the American cultural landscape like human outcroppings of especially unyielding material. One highly significant but seldom emphasized expression of their uniqueness is their rejection of formal organization. In a world where formal organizations have become necessarily ubiquitous, the Amish have been perhaps most unique in their ability to survive well into the twentieth century without employing the degree of formal organization routinely assumed to be a prerequisite for survival.2 As with their rejection of certain types of technology (Olshan 1981), their rejection of formal organization was based on purposeful adherence to a set of ultimate values. In this respect the Amish most closely approximate Weber's wertration7al (valuerational) social action, a rational orientation to absolute values (Weber 1968). Certainly the phrase "formal organization" is not part of Amish demonology, nor is it a term with which many Amish would be familiar. However, a brief inspection of some of the values fundamental to Amish culture reveals them to be profoundly antithetical to the establishment of formal organization. This normative stance derives from valuing: 1. an opposition to any ecclesiastical hierarchy beyond the local community, 2. a severing of all ties between the political and religious realms, 3. an untrained and unpaid clergy selected from within the community, 4. a separation from worldly (i.e., non-Amish) institutions to the extent possible, and 5. a glorification of simplicity. The value of simplicity is relevant to organizational structure since it has translated into the use of technologies that do not require a high level of social differentiation. Adherence to all of these values explains much of the schismatic This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 06:08:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Organizational Evolution of the Amish / 605 character of Amish history. More to the point for the present discussion, it explains the Amish's limited formal intercommunity and intercongregational association. To better understand the innovative character of the Steering Committee we need to look briefly at the context from which it emerged. In the absence of any formal ecclesiastical hierarchy beyond the local community, possibilities for decision making outside of the church district (i.e., the congregation) are limited. Ministers and bishops of congregations connected by common church rules do meet on occasion to discuss appropriate positions toward new technologies, styles of dress, and institutions. One of the earliest recorded Amish conferences took place in Pennsylvania in 1809. The various articles of the resulting "discipline" adopted included, for example, an agreement that church members of the districts represented be prohibited from participating in jury service (Bender 1934). The conference of 1865 addressed the draft issue, specifically the practice of exempting those who paid a commutation fee or provided a substitute (Bender 1946:223). Today the large Amish settlements in Lagrange County, Indiana, and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, continue to hold annual and semiannual gatherings of church officials, respectively. In other settlements such gatherings are held only when a problem arises that cannot be solved within the clhurcl district (Luthy 1979). Despite these occasional semiformal meetings, it would be injudicious to speak of the Amish as a single denomination. The Amish population is divided into numerous fellowships, all considered Old Order but differing in dress, level of technology considered appropriate, and other such issues. Members of a particular church district normally will only attend services in other districts if those districts are in fellowship with their own. The church district is the largest officially recognized administrative unit. The approximately 750 districts in the United States, and another 16 in Canada (Raber 1989), contain about 30 to 40 families each. The highest religious official is the bishop, whose formal authority extends only to the families in his own district. This arrangement corresponds closely to the concept of congregational polity elaborated by Wood (1970). Informally, more senior bishops command greater respect at conferences. Likewise, the members of a nominally autonomous church district will not lightly disregard the consensus of believers in other districts with which they are in fellowship. They will, for example, consider church rules of those districts when they agree on rules for their own church, which are formally determined by members of each district alone. As a result of this limited and uneven degree of formal coupling between districts, the establishment of a formally organized entity, speaking for all Amish communities in the United States, represents an unprecedented strategem in Amish history. Origins of the Steering Committee The Amish, despite the bucolic surroundings with which they are usually associated, exist in an environment dominated by large-scale organizations. Separation from the world is necessarily imperfect. They rely on non-Amish This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Fri, 02 Sep 2016 06:08:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 606 / Social Forces 69:2, December 1990 banks, medical facilities, and corporations of all kinds for goods and services as well as for employment.4 They pay income and property taxes, are subject to Department of Agriculture regulations, and must register with the Selective