On why organisations with strong identities loose the affective investment of the communities that constituted them — and what a century of sociology has understood about how this happens.
There is a moment in the life of many cultural institutions, artisan producers, and purpose-driven organisations that is recognisable in retrospect but almost invisible as it occurs. The organisation has not changed in any way that could be described as a failure. The programming continues, the product is still excellent, the staff are committed, and the governance is sound. But the quality of engagement has shifted — subtly, gradually, in ways that the metrics do not capture. The people who were once the most invested participants — the ones who came with something, who brought a quality of attention and commitment that was more than consumption are still coming, technically. But they are arriving differently, with less of themselves. And some of them, the oldest and most knowing, have quietly stopped coming at all.
This is not a communications problem or a positioning one. It is not, in any ordinary sense, a strategy problem. It is a structural condition with a precise sociological description — one that connects directly to the question at the centre of NOZ’s diagnostic practice: what happens when an organisation that was constituted by a genuine tension begins to dissolve that tension in favour of something more manageable?
ACADEMIC FINDINGS · What a century of sociology has established
Identity is not a property — it is co-production
The foundational insight of Simmel’s sociology of social forms is that institutions do not exist before the participation of those who inhabit them. They are brought into being through the ongoing acts of engagement, compliance, and resistance of every participant — including the most apparently peripheral ones. The museum exists because people enter it and encounter it in a particular way. The artisan producer exists because people buy the product and bring a specific quality of attention to the act of doing so. The cultural festival exists because people return to it, year after year, carrying something from the previous year into the new encounter.
This means that what we call an organisation’s identity is not a property it holds. It is something continuously co-produced in the exchange between the organisation and the community that chooses it. Simmel’s analysis of exchange is precise on this point: value does not pre-exist exchange but is constituted through it. What the community and the organisation create together — through the quality of their ongoing encounters — is not merely a relationship. It is the organisation’s identity itself, renewed or depleted by every exchange.
Simmel’s Philosophy of Money (1900) argues that value arises in the productive distance between a desiring subject and the object of their desire — in the threshold where the object is felt as significant and the reaching toward it generates something. An institution whose community no longer experiences productive distance — whose engagement has become habitual, frictionless, or merely compliant — is an institution from which value is draining, regardless of what its metrics show.
Foucault adds the dimension that makes this precise for identity-led organisations specifically. His analysis of subjectification argues that in participating in an institution, people do not merely engage with it — they become particular kinds of subjects through the engagement. The regular visitor to a museum becomes someone who looks at art in a particular way. The customer of an artisan producer becomes someone with a specific relationship to slow food and to the patience it embodies. The community member of a purpose-driven organisation becomes someone who understands themselves in relation to the tension the organisation holds.
This is the specific form of value that identity-led organisations produce, and that makes them irreplaceable: they do not merely offer a product or a service. They offer the community that chooses them a way of becoming someone. The choice is an act of self-constitution. And the organisation’s identity — the specific tension it holds, the particular quality of the encounter it makes possible — is what that self-constitution is in relation to.
An organisation’s most loyal community did not choose it for what it offers. They chose it for what they become through the choosing. That becoming is inseparable from the specific tension the organisation holds. Dissolve the tension and you do not offer them less. You offer them nothing to become.
Sociability, entropy, and the tragedy of forms
Simmel’s distinction between sociation and sociability is the analytical instrument that makes the dynamics of identity depletion visible. Sociation is goal-directed association — the formal architecture through which participants pursue their interests and fulfil their obligations. Sociability is the spontaneous, non-instrumental quality of engagement that makes participation feel meaningful beyond utility: the reason people bring themselves to an encounter rather than merely their attention or their money.
The key structural insight is that no institutional form can sustain the quality of co-production that constitutes its identity through sociation alone. The forms of governance, accountability, programming strategy, and audience development are all sociation: they organise and direct participation toward defined ends. What they cannot produce is the spontaneous affective investment — the genuine bringing of oneself — that makes the co-production generative rather than merely transactional. That investment arises from the sociability that the organisation’s constitutive tension makes possible. It is what people bring when they are genuinely changed by the encounter.
Simmel identifies a further dynamic that Lash (2005) articulates with precision: when the density of genuine affective investment in an institutional network falls below a threshold, the form becomes entropic. Not immediately or dramatically — the forms of participation continue; the visits happen, the purchases are made, the events are attended — but the quality of that participation has shifted from inhabitation to (passive) consumption, from genuine exchange to the performance of engagement. The institution that experiences this shift has not failed. It has become a form that is sustaining itself on the residue of the co-production it is no longer renewing.
This is what Simmel means by the tragedy of objective culture: the forms that were created to serve life assert their own logic against the life that produced them. The museum’s programme serves the museum’s programme. The artisan producer’s brand serves the brand. The purpose-driven organisation’s strategy serves the strategy. Each form is doing precisely what it was designed to do. The life that originally animated it — the quality of exchange that made it worth creating — has been displaced by its own success.
Arvidsson’s concept of ethical capital gives this dynamic a precise economic structure. Ethical capital is the accumulated residue of all the exchanges in which genuine co-production occurred — the asset that is built when an organisation consistently demonstrates, through the quality of its encounter with its community, that it is organised around the tension that brought them. It is the financial equivalent of the community’s ongoing willingness to be changed by the encounter. And like all capital, it can be drawn down without being replenished. An organisation whose governance processes have gradually rationalised the conditions of genuine exchange is drawing down ethical capital without knowing it — sustaining the forms of participation on accumulated goodwill that is not being renewed.
THE STRUCTURAL EQUIVALENCE · Where the bridge lands
The dissolution of constitutive tension is the depletion of sociability
The sociological framework above is describing, in precise theoretical language, the phenomenon that the NOZ diagnostic practice encounters at the intersection of identity and community: the specific form of loss that occurs when an organisation dissolves its constitutive tension in favour of something more legible, more manageable, or more fundable.
A constitutive tension — in the NOZ vocabulary — is the specific productive contradiction that the organisation was built to hold: the tension between two things that are genuinely in conflict and that generate, precisely through their coexistence, the quality of encounter that brings people to the organisation. It is the productive distance that Simmel identifies as the source of value. It is what people become particular kinds of subjects in relation to. It is the source of the sociability that makes genuine co-production possible.
When the constitutive tension is dissolved — not through a single decision but through the accumulation of individually reasonable accommodations that progressively simplify it — what is lost is not primarily a strategic position or a communications story. What is lost is the productive distance that made the exchange generative. The organisation becomes more accessible, more legible, more efficiently governed. And the community that was brought by the tension — that was becoming something through the encounter with it — finds, gradually and without being able to name what has changed, that the encounter is no longer offering them what they came for.
The community does not leave because the organisation has become worse. It leaves because the organisation has become easier. The tension that required something of them — that made the encounter genuinely demanding and therefore genuinely transformative — has been smoothed into a more comfortable version of itself. The exchange continues. The co-production that renewed the organisation’s identity stops.
This is the structural equivalence that this NOZ Bridges is establishing: what sociology identifies as the entropy of forms when sociability depletes is what NOZ diagnostics identify as corrosive drift. The mechanism is identical. The conditions that produce it are the same. And the consequence — an institution that is performing its identity rather than generating it — is the condition that both the sociological framework and NOZ diagnostics are designed to detect before it becomes irreversible.
The specific contribution of the sociological framework to the NOZ diagnostic is this: it explains why the depletion of constitutive tension is experienced by the community before it appears in any metric. Metrics measure sociation — the formal architecture of participation. The community’s sense that something has changed is a measurement of sociability — the quality of genuine exchange. These two registers do not move in parallel. Sociability can be depleting while sociation is improving. The community feels the loss while the organisation’s data shows growth. By the time the metrics register the loss, the ethical capital that was sustaining the forms of participation has been largely spent.
IMPLICATIONS FOR ORGANISATIONS · What this makes available
Reading the community as a diagnostic instrument
The implication of the structural equivalence is a reorientation of the diagnostic gaze: the community’s quality of participation is a more sensitive indicator of identity health than any internal metric the organisation uses to assess itself.
The community that built an organisation’s identity knows — before the organisation does, and before any measurement can capture it — when the constitutive tension is depleting. They know it in the quality of their own engagement: in the shift from arriving with something to arriving for something, from genuine inhabitation to comfortable consumption. The organisations that have detected corrosive drift earliest are almost always the ones that had relationships with their most invested community members that were close enough to register this shift as a signal rather than noise.
This means that the most important diagnostic practice for an identity-led organisation is not the board review, or the audience survey, or the strategic planning process. It is the cultivation of the relationships that allow the quality of community participation to be read honestly — the sustained closeness to the people who chose the organisation for its tension, whose willingness to be changed by the encounter is the measure of whether the tension is still operative. When these people start arriving differently, the constitutive tension is under pressure. When they stop arriving at all, it has been substantially resolved.
Arvidsson’s framework adds a specific diagnostic instrument to this practice: the quality of ethical relations — the depth and positivity of the affective bonds between the organisation and its community — is a leading indicator of identity health. An organisation whose ethical capital is depleting is an organisation whose co-production is faltering. The signals are not dramatic. They are: staff who comply without investing; communities who attend without committing; partners who fulfil obligations without genuine alignment. These are not performance problems. They are sociability problems — indicators that the exchange is no longer generating the quality of participation that the organisation’s identity requires.
The diagnostic question that this NOZ Bridges makes available is therefore precise: what is your public becoming through organisational encounters? You should not ask if they are satisfied. You should ask: are they changed? You should not ask are they loyal? What you should ask is: are they still bringing something that the encounter makes it possible for them to bring?
These questions cannot be answered by descriptive metrics alone. They require the kind of close, patient, relational attention that Simmel identifies as the condition of genuine exchange: the willingness to be present to the quality of the encounter rather than to its transactional outputs. They require, in other words, the same quality of attention that the organisation asks of its community — and that the community will stop bringing, quietly and without announcement, the moment the organisation stops offering them something worth bringing it for.
Sources
Arvidsson, A. (2006). Brands: Meaning and value in media culture. Routledge.
Arvidsson, A. (2011). Ethics and value in customer co-production. Marketing Theory, 11(3), 261–278.
Foucault, M. (1997). Ethics, subjectivity and truth: Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984 (Vol. 1). The New Press.
Lash, S. (2005). Lebenssoziologie: Georg Simmel in the information age. Theory, Culture & Society, 22(3), 1–23.
Lazzarato, M. (2002). From biopower to biopolitics. Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 13, 1–6.
Simmel, G. (1900/1978). The Philosophy of Money. Routledge.
Simmel, G. (1902). The number of members as determining the sociological form of the group. American Journal of Sociology, 8(1), 1–46.
Simmel, G., & Hughes, E.C. (1910/1949). The sociology of sociability. American Journal of Sociology, 55(3), 254–261.