Empowerment can be an evolutionary or planned change. But the planned change is gaining centrality because the evolutionary change is not happening sufficiently fast. Organising as a process and the emergence of organisations as a structure is almost a precurser to empowerment as a part of planned change. This is what this chapter analyses as the third strand in our conceptualisation of empowerment.

The extensive literature on organisation theory and organisation management focuses on the dynamics and functioning of organisations once they have come into existence. There is very little emphasis on exploring the process of the formation of organisations. An attempt is being made here to explore the process of organising at the societal level in the context of organisation theory.

The Horizontal and Vertical Planes

There are three spheres of organising, which constantly interact with each other at the societal level. These are:

These three spheres can be viewed as concentric circles which may or may not be linked with each other. When concentric circles are linked with each other they can form a spiral (pila like) or a cylindrical shape. When they are not linked to each other they can be understood as spheres of influence impacting one another.

The spiral shape emerges from the conventional placing (visualisation) of concentric circles as one circle within another circle and so on with a common centre. The innermost circle has the smallest diameter and the outermost circle has the largest diameter. These circles can be linked to each other with connecting loops from the innermost to the outermost circle.