Sui Generis

We see this concept in all kinds of group settings. I work at Enterprise Rent-A-Car. We have a very distinctive culture and there is certainly an underlying message that we send as we adopt this culture to ourselves. There are parts of the business that an employee is not socialized into, but trained on. Things like the computer system and the dress code and the homogenous look of the individual offices are not what Durkheim was going for when he explains how a culture doesn’t change simply because the individuals change. In the example of work, we’re all younger men. We don’t take the job too seriously, despite our wearing shirts and ties as mandated from our corporate headquarters. No matter if I go to a new office or if our branch gets a new manager, the basic perception of the company doesn’t change. I phone other offices often, even out of state, and the way we interact is always the same.
When I hear the cliché that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, I usually think back to various examples I learned in team-building exercises or priesthood lessons. Images of two candles making more than twice as bright a flame come to mind. Or two wooden boards holding more than twice their individual capacities, or horses pulling more together than they otherwise could separately are other popular object lessons. But in the context of sui generis, the whole is not simply bigger than the sum of its parts, but more important than the individuals. The wanna-be Communism of Stalin, Mao, Castro, and more modernly Kim impose this idea on its participants, which is the very reason it works so much better in our Western, capitalistic firms. Workers in a capitalistic society see their involvement in groups as voluntary. Sure, there are critics of the sincerity of volunteer when they are prostituting their labor for simply the highest wage they can negotiate. But those people also have their unions they can run too to undermine the work that others are doing. Durkheim came at this idea, however, from a descriptive angle. I don’t believe that he was creating an ideal, but rather describing a phenomenon.