---
published: true
layout: post
title: API Governance is Social
date: 2025-05-07T09:00:00.000Z
tags:
  - Governance
  - Social
  - Teams
  - Workers
  - People
image: https://kinlane-productions2.s3.amazonaws.com/algorotoscope-master/american-dream-fundamental-marketplace-people.jpg
---
As I was reading the [Study of Man Adjusting Men to Machines](https://www.commentary.org/articles/daniel-bell-2/the-study-of-man-adjusting-men-to-machines/) I kept thinking about how API governance is actually about people, despite the focus on the technical details of the design of APIs. I think that API operations has replaced the older concept of the factory, but much of what applied in the 1940s when it comes to understanding workers within the factor applies to our API operations.

- A factory has to be conceived as a social system, with the relations of its parts defined not only by the formal logical structure, but also by the informal structure and by the ceremonials, rituals, and non-logical sentiments that motivate behavior. The worker cannot be abstracted from his social situation.
- The function of the executive is not only to make policy, but to ensure its acceptance “down the line” by subordinates. Since human beings usually resist change, acceptance of change involves translating orders into terms that circumvent this resistance. Programs have to be “sold” to the personnel as a product is “sold” to the public.
- A factory system, like any stable social system, must be conceived as tending towards an equilibrium in which its different parts are functionally adjusted to each other. When change upsets equilibrium, the function of the executive is to observe which parts need adjustment in order to redress the balance. (This concept of equilibrium comes from the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, who has greatly influenced the Mayo group.)

When you implement API governance within the enterprise you quickly realize that the state of APIs has less to do with HTTP, JSON, and the technical details and how the people who are producing and consuming APIs see the world (or don’t). The response to the researchers studying workers within the factories of the 20th century remind me of the challenges I’ve faced trying to drive API governance conversations.

- Restriction of output reflects a conflict of status between office and shop. The engineers who come into the shop to fix norms are outsiders, “symbolic of a social group which in the factory has as its chief function the manipulation of the worker.”
- Restriction of output is an expression of resentment toward management. Factory management seeks to allocate workers’ time completely in terms of its own plans, in line with its own concept of efficiency.
- Restriction of output is an expression of cleavage in social ethics. The engineers tend to believe that the individual must look after his own economic interests and pursue his career at the expense of his fellows. The workers, sensing that social mobility upward has halted, and that they belong more or less permanently to their work groups, identify their interests with those of the group.

API governance is a social affair. Yes, there is code, artifacts, rules, and the other technical bits, but the problems that enterprises face with delivering consistent and standardized APIs that reflect the needs of their industries is about the social interactions across product, engineering, platform, support, sales, and other teams who are producing APIs in concert. The only thing that has changed from the last century to this one is that the products we are producing in our factories are digital and less tangible, but the worker challenges are the same, and if we are going to move the ship forward we need to focus on the people who are rowing.