Читать книгу Reframing Organizations - Lee G. Bolman - Страница 56

Networks have always been around, more so in some places than others. Cochran (2000) describes how Western and Japanese firms doing business in China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had to adapt their hierarchical structures to accommodate powerful social networks deeply embedded in Chinese culture. One British firm tried for years, with little success, to limit the ability of powerful informal leaders, who headed local networks based on kinship and village, to influence hiring and wages of the workforce. In the modern era, the proliferation of information technology beginning in the 1980s led to an explosive growth of digital networks—everything from small local grids to the global Internet. These powerful new lateral communication devices often supplanted vertical strategies and spurred the development of network structures within and between organizations (Gulati, Lavie, and Madhavan, 2011; Steward, 1994).

Many large global corporations have evolved into complex networks (Ghoshal and Bartlett, 1990; Gulati and Gargiulo, 1999). Horizontal linkages supplement and sometimes supplant vertical coordination. Such a firm is multicentric: initiatives and strategy emerge from many places, taking shape through a variety of partnerships and joint ventures. Powell, Koput, and Smith‐Doerr (1996) describe the mushrooming of “interorganizational networks” in fast‐moving fields like biotechnology, where knowledge is so complex and widely dispersed that no organization can go it alone. They give an example of research on Alzheimer's disease that was carried out by 34 scientists from three corporations, a university, a government laboratory, and a private research institute. Such cross‐organizational forms continue to grow in importance and variety.

We can observe the increased adoption of platforms, ecosystems, and crowds that is meant to help solve organizational design problems. Each of these approaches reflects a type of meta‐organization that encompasses many corporations, communities, or individuals linked not by contracts but rather by technology and/or a common goal. (Joseph and Gaba, 2020)