Collective Purpose and Social Structure

Motivation exists as a system of processes. Motivational processes are activities, whether overt or covert: the activities entailed in becoming committed, in evaluating, maintaining, or modifying existing commitments, and in guiding performance by its relevance for commitments. These activities are possible only if there are structures that set them in motion and carry them on. Such structures are occasioned and partially shaped by existing values and motives and by experiences, and they then act back upon the values and motives themselves. They also help determine the role and force of values and motives in behavior.

In the psychological systems of individuals, these structures include hierarchical and other relations among values and motives: for example, their comprehensiveness, their urgency, and their temporal sequencing. They include cognitive structures through which the relations of values and motives to environmental conditions are specified and through which implications are drawn. (Among these are the structures through which the impetus to action is judged as internal or external, as controllable or uncontrollable, as stable or unstable, and as intentional or unintentional (Hamilton 1983: 125–207; Weiner 1986:43–78). And there are the cognitive-motivational structures that protect the individual's ability to make and monitor commitments, including the self-protective activities found in ego defenses (Swanson 1988) and in what Brehm (1966; Brehm and Brehm 1981) has called psychological reactance .

In collectivities the most immediately relevant structures include arrangements for setting joint goals and for selecting the basic terms on which they will be implemented. These are "policy-level" arrangements: the arrangements for policy-making or policy-control that are a part of

the activities of all collectivities, however transient or enduring, formal or informal, and that become specified and differentiated in complex organizations. As motivation in individuals is distinguished from "knowing" (for example, information processing, memory) and from overt motor activity (performance), so collective arrangements for policy-making and control are distinguished from arrangements for acquiring and storing information, from arrangements for making information available when needed, and from arrangements for coordinating and conducting implementations of policy (from "lower management," "production," "marketing," or "service delivery"). I build on these points in studies of the cultures of societies.