Constitution

Field Guide

You’ll notice that some things at work would simply stop if the people currently running them left, and other things wouldn’t — even though both look, on any given Tuesday, like the same kind of activity.

A handful of employees at a mid-size company started an after-work softball team a few years back. It runs entirely on its own coordination: someone posts in the group chat about who’s playing this week, someone else keeps track of whose turn it is to bring the cooler, a third person handles the league registration fee every spring. It works well, and it’s been going for years.

If every one of those particular employees left the company within the same month, the team, as it currently exists, would simply stop. A different group of employees might start something they also call the company softball team — same name, maybe even the same jerseys — but they’d be starting it. They’d have to decide the rules, find someone to register the league, agree on the cooler rotation, all over again, from nothing. There’d be nothing to join. There’d only be something new to begin.

Compare that to the same company’s retirement plan. A brand-new hire, on their first day, simply steps into it: eligibility rules, a matching formula, a vesting schedule — none of which this new person negotiated, none of which the people currently in HR personally invented either. They inherit an ordering that already existed and is capable of being received by whoever shows up next, indefinitely, regardless of who happens to be administering it this year.

The distinction underneath this: Constitution is what makes Agency belong to the institution itself, as a continuing subject, rather than to whichever particular people happen to be coordinating it right now. The softball team has real Agency — people are acting together, toward something they actually want. What it doesn’t have is Constitution: its Agency belongs to the specific people currently exercising it, personally, for as long as they keep showing up — not to any subject that continues past them. The retirement plan’s Agency was never the personal property of whoever currently sits in HR. It already belongs to the company itself, as a continuing subject, which is exactly why a brand-new hire can step into its eligibility rules, matching formula, and vesting schedule as theirs, without negotiating a single term. The new hire’s receiving it isn’t what makes it constituted. It’s able to be received because it already was.