Felix Stalder on Fri, 14 Apr 2006 12:16:26 +0200 (CEST) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Re: <nettime> Markets, Hierarchies, Networks: 2 questions |
On Thursday, 13. April 2006 16:51, Brian Holmes wrote: > First let's try to figure out what's really being talked > about. Felix seems to be referring to the theory of economic > organization, and probably to three landmark papers: > > -Ronald Coase, "The Nature of the Firm" (1937) > -Walter J. Powell, "Neither Market Nor Hierarchy" (1990) > -Yochai Benkler, "Coase's Penguin" (2002) Mostly. The field I'm speaking about is organizational theory, located between economics and sociology. Institutionally, organizational theory has been connected to economic and management departments, hence they used to see only markets and firms (hierarchies) and, since post-fordism, networks. This really is very standard. However, for the present discussion, I think it's important to add a fourth type, communes (NOT commons) or co-operatives. They represent attempts to combine explicit planning and decision-making (like hierarchies) while working against a hierarchical division of labor, so typical for firms and bureaucracies. However, since their economic impact used to be relatively small, and, more generally, they were regarded poorly by the proponents of 'free markets' that make up these departments, they were ignored by organizational theory. We should not do the same mistake. I am, and I think Ned is too, interested in networks as governance mechanisms that are different from other institutional structures. Hence, I think it's not useful to argue that any type of connection is a network, as Shannon Clark did. I know that's how the concept is used in a technological context, or within complexity theory, but since these field are not concerned with issues of power, i.e. governance, I don't think their approach is useful here. > So my first question is this: How justified is it to think > of FOUR different forms of productive organization - market, > hierarchy, network and commons? Aren't the last two just > variations on each other? As already mentioned, I meant communes (or cooperatives) and not commons. I think the difference between cooperatives and networks are important, in as much as cooperatives have explicit decision-making structures and means to enforce their decisions, but do not function as hierarchies. > If the aim is to examine > large-scale organizations in the real world, isn't it best > to establish the distinctions and hybridizations between > THREE broad sets of rules or structures of governance - > based on competition, subservience and reciprocity, or on > market, hierarchy and network? Perhaps, in this view, a commune would be a close-kit type of network. But I'm not sure how far this really gets us. If you look at how power works, there are real differences between these different sets. In markets, power is based on money, since the coordination takes place through price signals. In hierarchy, power is based on position, since decision-making authority is hard-coded into the structure of the organization. In a network, power is a) based on the ability to define the network protocol, and b) on the ability to contribute to the overall goal of the network on the basis of that protocol. In cooperatives, power is based on the ability to create consensus. > And finally, is "network" > really the best possible name for the last form of > structuring and governance, or does it just lead to > confusion because of the connection to ICT hardware and the > associated diagrams? Why not talk about market, hierarchy > and cooperation? Somehow, I think 'cooperation' is located on a different, normative, level. I have a hard time to think of cooperation in negative terms, and I have less problems thinking of networks as, say, being set up for exploitation. > The second question springs from that last point, and has to > do with social network analysis. As far as I can tell, this > is a science - or branch of inquiry, anyway - that's mainly > driven by innovations in graphic representation, > particularly the Pajek software developed by a couple of > Slovenian researchers, but also the stuff by Valdis Krebs, > etc. The question is, does social network analysis have a > theory? Because in effect, you can REPRESENT anything as a > network, once you have defined nodes (and categories of > nodes) plus connections (and quantities or qualities of > connections). Those analytic representations take the form > of fascinating pictures. But what kinds of theoretical > synthesis come after the analysis? Does social network > analysis make specific contributions to our understandings > of the ways people structure and govern their relations to > each other? Or does it just subsume every kind of relation > under the picture of a network? As far as I know, social network analysis (sna) is a method, not a theory. it's basically a mapping technique, a method to measure communicative interaction between a set of people, primarily quantitatively. For sna, any set of connections is a network. For a long time, sna was limited because of the real-life difficulties of measuring interaction. Since electronic communication has taken off, sna has had some kind of renaissance, because it's now every easy to gather data on communicative interaction. Up to this point, I've seen very little that is interesting in this field, but perhaps with larger data-sets, things might become interesting. However, like all mapping techniques where one groups maps another one, much of the non-academic impetus behind it is one of control, hoping to find non-obvious connections between people which can be exploited for this or that end. In the late 1990s, I was doing research on electronic money, and I met David Chaum, who was doing digicash at the time. I asked him why he had become interested in anonymous e-cash. The story he told me sounds credible, even though I don't know if it's true. He said that before the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973, the CIA has done extensive analysis of the communication pattern among senior officials of the administration. They were not interested in what they were taking about. What they were really interested in were the communicative networks and in understanding who are the key nodes, connecting one part of the administration to another. These were the people they were taken out first, thus seriously crippling the ability of the government to coordinate its response to the events. He was a afraid that online such techniques would be even more powerful if we did not have anonymous communication, including financial communication. Felix ----http://felix.openflows.org------------------------------ out now: *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 ----- End forwarded message ----- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net