Rebirth requires learning/12- The transformation of a charisma in the organisational phase, from the founder's first generation to the second.
by Luigino Bruni
Article published in no. 8/2024 of Città Nuova on 4 January 2025
Max Weber, perhaps the greatest sociologist ever, theorised at the beginning of the 20th century about the relationship between charismatic leadership and bureaucratic leadership, i.e. the ‘government (kratos) of offices (bureau)’. His thesis was very straightforward: if and when a movement born of a charismatic founder becomes, e.g. upon the founder's death, an institution and thus a bureaucratic organisation, the charisma dies to give birth to the institution.
For Weber, when a charismatic movement becomes an organisation, the institutional phase begins. In other words, there is no charismatic institution possible: you can either have a charisma without an institution or an institution without a charisma. Weber's theory is radical and has been the subject of various modifications and mitigations over the last hundred years, nonetheless it remains a great idea with which to reason, even for the world of religious charismas in the Church and outside it, where the discourses are more complicated.
First of all, even if we take Weber's theory seriously, we cannot say that in a contemporary institution today born from a charisma of yesterday, there is no longer any trace of the founder's original charisma in its organisational life, statute, governance, lifestyle, narrative capital or identity. All this remains, and the charisma continues to be visible in some way in the life of the organisation, or at least it can be.
But - and this is where the decisive point lies - when a community passes from the first generation of the founder to the second and (later) generation of the organisation, the nature of that community changes with this passage. And it changes in some important and often crucial aspects. In particular, the main instrument for attracting and selecting new members for the movement (and for retaining the ‘old’ ones) changes. In the first, charismatic phase, in fact, people, especially young people, were attracted by the charisma personified by the figure of the founder. People entered the community because they were enchanted by the prophecy of the charisma and the prophet, they were fascinated and attracted by the charismatic spiritual ideal in itself, without any need for anything else. Because, when a charismatic community begins, the prophetic force of the founder(s) is so great that it arouses so-called pure vocations, that is, people who do not enter a community to perform a job, a task or to achieve goals, but only because they have a - somewhat extraordinary - experience of total identification between the individual and the collective spirit, they discover they already belong to that charisma before getting to know it. In the second, organisational phase, on the other hand, new members are attracted by the message, the purpose, the goals, the values, if they are explicit and interesting, and this is not always the case. It is not easy, in fact, for a charisma of yesterday to be translated into an understandable and attractive message today, not least because the same adult members that have lived the founding experience are the ones struggling to find motivation in the new institutional phase, where many live like fish out of water, even when they become amphibians in order to survive. Objectives, values, goals, important and often good things, but external to the charisma itself, do not selectmore vocations, that is, people willing to spend their entire lives, because vocations are only generated by the ideal in itself and by its absolute and infinite nature. Instead, in the institutional phase, adherents, sympathisers, employees of the structure and supporters are attracted, who approach for one or another of the institution's objectives.
This is the so-called ‘NGOnisation’ of movements, which change in nature, and from prophecy they turn into works, and can do many good things, however different ones from what they did before. This is the fate of many current communities born in the 1900s by charismatic founders. It is not always a bad fate. So does the charisma-prophecy have no more chance in the phases following the first? It may if the organisation succeeds in generating reformers who will be able to re-launch new charismatic and prophetic phases in different places and in various forms. And the reformers will be many, not all consistent with each other.
After the founders, the great trees of yesterday can continue the prophetic experience if they become forests. Otherwise, they must organise themselves to become an institution, to start reasoning like institutions, using the instruments of institutions (incentives, for example) that will bear different fruit, perhaps even good fruits but different ones. The evolution of charismas into institutions is in part inevitable, but in part it depends on the choices, talents and courage of their governments and individuals.
