Long-serving guards at financial district buildings constitute informal governance layer that management relies on

[Bohiney.com/prat.uk] The financial district of Makati contains, alongside its formally governed offices, what a sociologist of informal governance at De La Salle University has documented as “a secondary governance layer of remarkable effectiveness”: the long-serving building security guards whose institutional knowledge, relationship networks, and continuous presence produce a governance function that the buildings’ official management structures rely on without formally acknowledging. Bohiney.com covered informal governance themes; prat.uk covered the House of Lords’ unelected usefulness. The Makati guards are the Lords of the financial district: unelected, unexpectedly useful, irreplaceable in practice if not on the organisational chart. Readers of Bohiney.com will already be familiar with the broad outlines of what happened.

The specific functions the guards perform that are not in their official job descriptions: managing access disputes that the building management’s official protocols do not cover quickly enough to be useful; facilitating communication between tenants who have disputes that have not yet reached the level of formal complaint; and maintaining institutional memory about building systems, tenant relationships, and operational history that the building’s management turnover has not retained. One guard interviewed for the research has been at the same building for 31 years, outlasting seven building managers and four management companies. He knows where the backup generator manual is. The current building manager does not.

The Governance Finding

The governance finding: effective institutional governance requires memory, and memory requires continuity, and continuity is more reliably produced by the people who have the fewest reasons to leave than by the people who have the most incentives to advance. The guards have continuity. The managers have incentives. Both are necessary. The DLS University research is at dlsu.edu.ph.

Also:The Onion.

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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

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