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Network logic paradise inhabited by vertically integrated tribes of employees. 2 But corporate anthropologists debunked the myth of the CEO, the savage noble burned at the stake in a bonfire of vanities, just as British anthropologists overturned the myth of the noble savage a century before. Why? Because whether the jungles are green and leafy or concrete, they are brimming with intricate webs of relationships, which when viewed from afar reveal elementary structures. Initially, these elementary structures were sorted into a triptych of organisational forms: markets, hierarchies and networks. Standing at one end, a chorus of economists droned ‘market’ as their mantra – the genesis of organisational life. On the other end perched hierarchy, the logical evolutionary endpoint, the height of civilised achievement. Networks were largely ignored or dismissed as a mixed breed, a doomed hybrid nesting somewhere between the two. But the resulting theoretical continuum of market – network – hierarchy was misguided, as was made profoundly apparent on September 11, 2001. Networks would prove to be core to the continuum, and hierarchy the hybridised half-breed. Networks were and are deeply linked to cultural genesis and genocide, and comprise the core DNA within any governance structure. Transaction costs and organisational form To understand how the old continuum, though mistaken, became accepted, we start with Ronald Coase’s classic paper on the nature of the firm. 3 Coase suggested that firms and markets, while different organisational structures, nevertheless share common transactional practices. The distinction, later amplified by Williamson, 4 was based on the amount of knowledge about a transaction (or ‘asset specificity’) that was required. Disinterested, non-repetitive exchanges occurred as market transactions (simple contracts). But exchanges that entailed greater uncertainty, and therefore a proportional amount of asset specificity, were best sheltered within the firm as a way to mitigate the greater risk. Once these transactions were harboured in the firm, inefficiencies devolved. Williamson argued that these inefficiencies were tolerated, 38 Demos
Towards a theory of government in fact preferred, because of the firm’s own bounded rationality – better the devil you know than the devil you don’t – and theories of firm and hierarchy were conceived. 5 In refining these propositions and terms a continuum of transactions emerged, beginning with the disinterested and discrete market transactions on one end and the interested, asset-specific transactions of a firm’s hierarchy on the other. Powell suggested that networks deserved a place on the continuum, for they permitted exchanges that required asset specificity but at the same time could move through semi-permeable organisational boundaries typical of family businesses, guilds and cartels. 6 Networks collide and collude and are able to elude organisational boundary ‘checkpoints’ nimbly because of the trust and mutual reciprocity between the actors – in essence invisibly storing the asset-specific knowledge of the transaction in the trust relationship itself. 7 Networks produce nuanced asynchronous and asymmetric exchanges, deftly avoiding both the visible hand of hierarchy 8 and the invisible hand of the market. 9 Sounds right, feels right – but it’s wrong. Let’s rethink the continuum in light of the logic of exchange and put the argument right. At one extreme are disinterested, non-repetitive exchanges typically found in markets. The logical inversion would be repetitive exchanges of mutual interest evidenced in networks. Hierarchy, comprised of routine exchanges (repetitive like a network) with a governing authority (more in keeping with the contractual characteristics of market exchanges), is now squarely in the middle, having qualities of both network and market. Table 1 summarises these organisational forms and features in their logical order. Ramifications for organisations What does this mean for organisations? In markets, it’s a ‘free-for-all’ – a knowledge diaspora, information spreading virally to where it is most needed regardless of legal (or moral) boundaries. But in organisations, the interests are best if not ‘self’ served when knowledge is more closely held because of the routine and repetitive exchanges that result from established procedures and the knowledge Demos 39
Page 1: Network Logic Who governs in an int
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women’s networking movement. This
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