Four categories of organizational structure

¶ … Categories

The word charisma has a Greek origin and it means "gift," especially referring to a gift from the gods. Powers that could not be explained in regular understanding were called charisma. The Catholic Church recovered the word to define talents such as prophecy, wisdom and curing abilities, which were believed to be granted by God. Later the word was used to refer to an extraordinary quality which makes whoever possessed it endowed with special charm that leaders use to communicate with people. Often it is not really charisma but a very clever use of manipulating power. Charismatic leaders are characterized by their sensibility towards people's needs and an unusual capacity to perceive the circumstances of the situation, as well as the opportunities. They use intuition to formulate visions. Those leaders are different from others because of the way they communicate, having a great sense of strategic vision. The charismatic leader must make his followers strongly desire to accomplish their vision, and achieves this by building great confidence in themselves and their objectives among their followers. They especially use their own image and personal example to model the behavior of their followers.

Traditional societies are usually those that remain very faithful to their history and customs and usually refuse to accept the influence of other countries or societies. Those are usually closed groups, sometimes racist or excluding other social groups that don't belong to their culture or disagree with their beliefs. Those societies have strong religious beliefs and follow blindly their classical ideologies, trying to remain as unaltered as possible. Some example could be the Arabian countries, but also Asian and African regions. Eastern people tend to be more traditional than western ones, that are usually more open to change and innovation. Modern society considers tradition a form of restriction for progress, and they see change and innovation as a tool for modernization.

Those traditions usually lead to ethnic issues as well. In order to define ethnic conflicts we should establish the different situations where ethnic groups interact within society. An ethnic group is a collectivity that identifies itself based on elements such as language, religion, race, or the combination of all of those elements, and that share a common identity feeling with other members of the same group that may also be identified as nations, people, minorities or communities. Ethnic conflicts are usually social, political or religious. Those may appear in situations where different groups share relatively equal positions regarding richness and power. When one of the groups fears that their position may be deteriorating they react against the other group. Usually an ethnic group may coincide with a social class, as it was the case with immigrant workers or slaves. Social and political conflicts can manifest themselves as ethnic issues and often affect the state, threatening the institutional model where the political power is based. The persistency of those conflicts for long periods of time and the intense violence that usually comes with it has established the distinction between interest conflicts and identity conflicts. Ethnic conflicts are usually identity based, where the involved parts tend to exclude each other and sometimes leading to ethnic cleansing, that refers to elimination of the other groups. Such conflicts appear when the dominating model is in contradiction with the ideologies and behavior of the subordinated groups. Genocide usually comes with this kind of conflicts, when the involved groups grow to hate each other so much that they decide to establish an unofficial war to terminate the other groups as a way to eliminate the cause of their annoyance. This phenomenon can manifest itself in many ways, from social discrimination and exclusion, accompanied by stereotypes, prejudice and discrimination, going as far as political actions, violent confrontations, genocide, terrorism and war.

The use of violence or threat to recur to it with political intentions aimed towards minorities or communities is usually carried out by nongovernmental groups or secret organizations that operate outside the regular parameters of official war or political negotiation. They often seek revolution or civil war. More than military goals, terrorism seeks to cause panic within the community to force them into acting according to the terrorist will. Terrorism often tries to destabilize a state creating chaos to make a radical transformation in its existing order. Terrorism has existed even from ancient times, when the Jews rebelled against the roman domination with illicit violent acts, at the beginning of the Christian era. Another example are the Muslims assassinations during the crusades. Governments have also recurred to violence to ensure the control over their people and repression of dissidents. The assassination of important personalities was one of the most commonly employed weapons of this form of war. After WWI the XX century experienced the diffusion of terrorism in a larger scale. Regimes like the Nazi or soviet government used violence and panic to impose an ideology on their own people.