On Procedures

Though the term may have an overly political or juridical connotation, procedure saturates human life. A citizen encounters it in the manner by which he casts his ballot in an election; an employee in how he fills out and files the paperwork for a new client; a husband and wife in how they keep their kitchen organized. However explicit or precise, procedures help to structure all these different contexts. Yet this aspect of human experience can easily be mistaken for two other ubiquitous features of activity: rules and commands. Whether in governmental, professional, or domestic life, the perpetual presence and importance of rules, procedures, and commands makes understanding their distinct features and purposes essential to comprehending human activity as such.

Of primary importance is a definition of procedure that can then be contrasted to rules and commands—a movement illuminating in employing both positive and negative considerations. Definitionally, the answer is quite simple: a procedure is an established and replicable (set of) action(s) by which a specified result is achieved. Put somewhat analytically: Do Y to achieve X. The use of a procedure manifests in two distinct ways that both deserve attention. 1) A procedure can be used as the way through which a specific end is achieved, thus giving the procedure to an agent can help him to accomplish a given task; one might imagine providing a young baker with a recipe to make a Black Forest Cake for the first time—in this sense, the pithy definition of a procedure is emphasized on the back half: Do Y to achieve X. 2) A procedure can also work to standardize how something is done to ensure consistency, and thus the procedure is the path that must be taken if the specified end is to be achieved; this is the manner in which the cooks at a fast food establishment will all make the burgers the same way even if they could, ostensibly, do so in a variety of ways—in this sense, the pithy definition is emphasized on the front half: Do Y to achieve X. Procedures, taken in either sense, are simply a frame of action placed upon the accomplishment of an end specified by a given activity and agent: if something is to be achieved, there is a way to do so. In this sense, procedures are not compulsory but formative, in that they are only subscribed to when certain objectives are desired for reasons that the procedure does not itself supply.

Rules are similar to procedures but more open ended; instead of providing a frame of reference for achieving a specifiable end, they are conditions to be subscribed to in all actions undertaken without entailing any specific outcome. In this sense, we might understand the rules of a game: in soccer, the use of one’s hands (unless one is a goalkeeper) is prohibited. This does not, however, mandate how one moves the ball outside of that prohibition. One can use his heel, head, knee, left foot, right foot, etc., and all those can be used in a variety of ways. Importantly, rules need not be formalised into explicit codices like they are in sports, games, or especially the law. They may be only implicit in a given activity, the most common of which is a language. Languages are surely comprised of many procedures as well, such as whether one is to put the adjective before or after a noun. On the side of rules, however, we find certain prohibitions, here sticking with English: that one cannot use a direct and indirect article in immediate succession (“the a” or “a the”), or that one cannot end a sentence with a preposition (something now often violated in much writing—I believe I am likely guilty of this myself).

Rules, however, are frequently dependent on procedures in a variety of ways. Not only will any given activity require procedures to fill in the gaps between what is not prohibited within a set of rules, such as how there are procedures used to train a soccer player to move the ball within the confines of the rules; the violation of the rules also requires redress, and this is impossible without procedures. Whether this be the intrusion of a police and juridical apparatus in governance or the referee in a sporting match, there is a recognizable way of addressing the violation of the rules and retributing the victim(s) for the infraction in some manner. This does not make rules merely the outgrowth of procedures (as both are merely abstract notions derived from a given activity), but should make us notice that procedures have an active priority in reconstituting the activity in a manner that rules do not.

A command, by contrast, is a complex notion in that it can be distinct in itself or overlap with the prior two notions of procedures and rules. A command, simply, is an issuance of a specified instruction such that another agent acts in conformity with the intentions of the issuer. In some cases, a command can overlap with a rule or procedure. For instance, a father may have established a rule that a specific room of his house is off limits to his children, but he may still command that the children not enter that room if he suspects they are entertaining doing so; as well, a manager may instruct his employee to fill out a certain form during a transaction despite this being part of their usual procedures (perhaps the employee forgot or believed he could get away without doing it). A command is often, on the other hand, also a distinct instruction to perform a certain action that is reducible neither to a rule or procedure. Examples of this are obvious: a mother telling her child to clean up his room; a police officer redirecting traffic due to a road closure; a store owner telling his employee to take the trash out back.

Like rules, commands are nonetheless dependent, in many instances, upon procedures. The obvious way is that a superior may instruct his inferior to perform a given task, and—to achieve the demanded end—the inferior will likely employ some kind of procedure. A McDonald’s Manager can be imagined as commanding another Big Mac be made; the Crew Member will then employ the various procedures that have been standardised to do so. The less obvious way that procedures inform commands is that there is often a procedural element to the establishment of roles, meaning the distinguishable and often imbalanced relational dynamics of various activities such as parent and child, manager and employee, teacher and student, etc. In some sense, these relations are actually structural and open ended procedures: if X commands, then perform commanded action Y. Commands that lack such recognised, procedural structures will often not be fulfilled: a stranger in the street commanding someone to do something, however benign, is unlikely to be met with compliance unless an obvious reason for doing so becomes apparent.

The ubiquity and importance of procedures, so expressed, is evident both in straightforwardly understanding their character as well as how they further support other common aspects of human activity, namely rules and commands. This should not, however, be mistaken for the idea that procedure is a self-sufficient let alone self-actuating reality. This is the claim of ‘proceduralism,’ a theory employed in political, legal, and even moral thought: crudely put, this perspective suggests that what legitimates and justifies a given activity or way of life is the implementation, adherence to, and upholding of procedures. No doubt, those who uphold this sort of view will have more substantial commitments (even if reluctant to admit this), but the source of those commitments and how they relate to the procedural realities of life often goes undertheorized.

The most effective way out of this trap is to argue that procedures are of a secondary importance to a given activity or way of life that has its own embodied, tacit norms. They are ‘secondary’ not because they come later in time, but because they presuppose a form of human conduct already intelligible—at least minimally—to its participants. Procedures are, at best, articulations that maintain the structure of this emergent manner of action, as are rules and (hopefully) whatever commands may be issued. Indeed the justification of changing rules, procedures, and commands is precisely through recognizing a change in the practice of a given activity (like the MLB implementing a pitch-clock to keep the game moving—an objective deemed relevant by recourse to sentiments of those already involved in the sport). This in no way entails a determinative or exhaustive understanding of what such activities are. Like in a soccer match, one may have a variety of rules, procedures, and commands interweaving, but no one thinks that this fixes the result. A given activity or way of life can be open-ended while also having recognised norms, and what should always be remembered is that the articulation of those norms cannot supplant the foundations of the activity they govern. This, of course, would require a far more elaborate and extensive theorizing of human conduct itself which can be but intimated as it has been here.