August 1, 2012

Understanding Structure and Hierarchy in the Gülen Movement – 2

Martin Taylor

In my previous blog post, in an effort to understand and explain how the Gülen Movement (also called Hizmet) operates without a top-down organizational structure, I looked at Gore Inc, a privately owned high-tech company producing over a thousand products and an annual turnover of $2.5 billion with over 9,000 employees and factories in more than 30 countries. Gore Inc operates as a flat lattice organization without any organizational charts, without a hierarchy of managers and fixed lines of communications between them, without a chain of command and pre-assigned lines of authority and without bosses or titles. So I asked this straightforward question: if this huge, extremely successful international high-tech company can run its business on the basis of a flat lattice structure, then surely it should come as no surprise that a non-profit social movement could also do its work, and do it equally successfully, on the same basis – that is, without a central, hierarchical organization.