Historic co-determination helps monasteries navigate digital change

The monks likely have the time to think about implementation, and feeling like they’re part of an institution that transcends them and that they value for its own sake, they likely have an incentive to invest effort into maintaining and improving it.

Both of these are unlike, say, corporate environments, where the core work uses up almost all available time and where most people are looking mostly to extract something from the organization.

There are still plenty of religious cults out there if that is your thing, probably more than have ever been. Otherwise the "misfits" are nowdays also organizing themself to indeed fit somewhere and don't just accept to be outcasts.

Sorry, but the whole concept of "place for people who don't fit" - is really not appropriate for monasteries in general. Because they have been very strict about who can fit. Only those who are fine with this special lifestyle and fixed rituals (and fixed hierachy and dogma). And most monks had to adopt to accept, whether they liked it or not, as the alternative was starving.

Monasteries follow strict rules. Good for those who fit these rules but monasteries are far from a place for people who don’t fit.

I may have missed something though - I don’t see how is that related to the linked article.

Maybe I'm just slow this morning, but I had trouble figuring out what this story was about. The actual title on the linked article is "Historic co-determination helps monasteries navigate digital change across three countries". It's a press release for a recent paper by Danko and Ross of the University of Zurich "Dinosaurs of the organizational landscape facing technological disruption: Liability of aging and exaptation in monastic orders". It's about how old monasteries are coping with modern technology. The paper seems to be available in full here:

Abstract

Some organizations remain adaptable across centuries while others struggle to evolve and ultimately fade into irrelevance. Only a handful of theories can explain this extraordinary adaptability. We test two competing theoretical perspectives in imprinting research: Liability of aging suggests that older organizations are at greater risk of disruption by modern technologies, but older organizations can also repurpose their imprinted structures and processes to their advantage in a process termed exaptation. To resolve this contradiction, we analyze Catholic religious orders and their monasteries. They represent the oldest extant organizations, were founded in various historical eras, and are facing contemporary challenges posed by digitalization. Our quantitative and qualitative findings indicate that the orders with historically decentralized imprints show higher adaptability in embracing digital innovation. Our results confirm that long-term adaptability is increased in organizations whose imprinted decentralized logics provide a propensity for exaptation. However, these long-standing organizations are also more wary of the negative effects of digital disruption and appear to shield their organizational core more strongly. We contribute to imprinting research by shedding light on the intricate relationship between historically imprinted organizational logics and contemporary organizational practice and highlight the often-underappreciated importance of exaptation for long-term adaptability.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004873332...

Your comment (and some others) have me imagining an alternate reality where the vatican runs the equivalent of github and all major FOSS infrastructure is maintained by religious orders. (There's probably a controversy where the catholic and islamic GPL equivalent licenses are incompatible for inane reasons.)