Patronage plays an important part in the stratification of social worlds organized around technical work. It is the patronage in technical worlds that gives them much of their peculiar flavor, a vigorous compost produced by something that isn't really a social movement, and isn't really an ethnic group, but seems to act sometimes like either or both.
Patronage is a kind of social stratification. A patronage system is comprised of personal relations between a few relatively powerful people and their relatively weak clients. Clients form a retinue or train which enhances the social position of the patron, and which provides a pool of resources that the patron can draw on. The patron provides access to wealth, glory, or other scarce goods, and perhaps some kind of political protection as well.
The relations in a patronage system are personal. They exist between a unique person as patron, and unique people as clients (who may, in turn, have clients of their own). This way of organizing things contrasts quite sharply with both feudalism and the modern class system, which rest on categories of people, not individuals. Stratification in a patronage system is thus made up of chains of influence, obligation and loyalty, rather than switches among substitutable instances of a category. Hence, patronage relations have unique histories. The commitments that clients and patrons make to one another do not, in general, transfer to others.
We see patronage in operation nowadays wherever we find uniquely accomplished people who can command substantial resources in their own right. The most familiar examples are the star systems characteristic of many branches of the entertainment industries. Stars can build substantial entourages of supporters and assistants. They can also influence the hiring and investment decisions of studios, teams, and other organizations in their industries. And of course, they also benefit from the deference paid to celebrity.
The learned professions are another group of social worlds in which patronage relations flourish. Senior physicians, attorneys, professors, scientists, programmers and engineers control considerable resources through their positions on review committees of all sorts, and via the weight of their implicit and explicit recommendations, both formal and informal. The influence of an individual professional is acquired over time by converting personal reputation into referrals, appointments, committee assignments, assignment to plum projects, and other offices. The personal reputation is acquired via formal and informal peer review. Prestigious titles and awards serve as surrogate measures of reputation, but it is personal reputation which counts.
Patronage trains in technical worlds are relatively short. A professional may gain some reflected glory (and hence, influence) from being the student or colleague of a hero in the field, but those who depend him or her in turn will gain very little by that fact. There doesn't seem to be much research on this subject available, so there's not much to say on the subject. The primary advantage (certainly a very large one) is in the accumulation of opportunities over the course of a career.
On the other hand, such connections tend to overlap a lot, so that they form a fairly dense mesh rather than a spreading tree. Technical worlds, that is, tend to be thickets of densely interconnected collegial relations. A few people tend to stand out as especially prominent in the mesh, but there are many cross-connections. Someone in the middle of such a mesh is at the center of many flows of information, influence and opportunity. Someone near the center of more than one such cluster can exert very large influence over multiple specialties.
This way of looking at technical work raises many interesting questions. The ones I find most interesting this week are about the relationships among the reputation-and-patronage stratification of technical worlds, and the complex organizations which anchor those worlds by training and employing their members. Most professionals work in bureaucratic organizations. Professors work in colleges and engineers typically work in relatively large firms (startups are a prominent exception). Physicians may often work in individual or small group practices, but they are utterly dependent on large, complex hospitals for much of what they do. Lawyers and accountants increasingly work in large firms, even when those firms consist of their fellow professionals.
In buraucracies, the evaluation of staff members follows principles which do not mesh well with the reputation-oriented habits of technical worlds. Bureaucracies tend to assess performance in terms of resources consumed and produced, rather than the technical quality of the work. Lawyers are evaluated in terms of the hours they bill, not the justice they obtain for clients. Professors are evaluated in terms of student-contact-hours, not the wisdom they impart. Programmers are evaluated in terms of lines of code produced, rather than the elegance of the information-processing procedures they write. Of course, this is an exaggeration, and many organizations weigh technical accomplishments very heavily in their evaluations. This is especially true in those organizations (e.g., hospitals, some universities) where the technical worlds still exert considerable influence on administrations. Even here, there is often a sharp difference between officers and enlisted men, tenured and untenured, partners and associates.
The contrast between the performance-based criteria of the bureaucracies and the reputation-based criteria of the technical occupations leads to endless tensions and difficulties in the organization and management of technical work, for both individual practitioners and the organizations that employ them. People who may exert great influence in their fields may exert very little influence in their organizations, and vice-versa. I'll talk more about some of these difficulties and related questions in future posts. Here, I just want to make the point that the most advanced and problematical kinds of work we do are dependent for their effectiveness upon a system of personal relationships with (and among) people typically known as "heros", "rainmakers", "wizards", "mages", and "gurus".
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