Orgs -Dynamic and Non-Linear Theory
The Collapse of Complex Business Models
I gave a talk last year to a group of TV executives gathered for an annual conference. From the Q&A after, it was clear that for them, the question wasn’t whether the internet was going to alter their business, but about the mode and tempo of that alteration.
The Pirate Wheel
This is a first attempt to outline the Privacy spoke of The Pirate Wheel . It will certainly change over time, but this is a first stake in the ground. The Pirate Ideology is a new ideology that centers around the power over information, and gives it to the citizens, forcing a transparent government.
Essays - Spring 2010 Print If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts
Solitude and Leadership: an article by William Deresiewicz | The American Scholar
Why Self-Organized Networks Will Destroy Hierarchies — A Credo by Kevin Carson
So long as the predominant production methods required large aggregations of capital beyond the means of individuals and small groups, and corporate hierarchies were propped up by state ones, the cultural pathologies of hierarchy were surmountable. But technological change is rapidly eroding the requirement for capital outlays, nullifying the advantages of capital ownership, and increasing the vulnerability of hierarchy to external and internal attacks by self-organized networks. by Apr 17
Break Free from Our Systems Prison
As a worker cooperator I have struggled for years to use 'normal' management techniques in worker co-ops. Often they don't work.
Redundancy Efficiency Creativity
For centuries human organisations and endeavours have sought to be efficient, to use as few resources as possible to achieve the ends desired. It is the number one goal in 20 th century management theory, underpinning that whole systems theory based ideology.
Valence Theory of Organization / Effective Theory
In an earlier chapter, I describe how Inter Pares considers the issue of scaling and growth, and suggest this comparison between BAH and UCaPP organizations:Education: Uncertainty Isn't the Only Risk
Yesterday I gave a talk at the Snoqualmie Valley School District Foundation fundraising luncheon.
Dropping the Industrial Age Framework This is perhaps the most controversial of the robust implications, and one that appears here and on the list of uncertainties (as Measurement Approach below). We think of schools as factories and tests scores as key performance indicators. Current approaches to testing do not serve learning. Some educators take large chunks of their year to "teach to the test." Some school districts, when faced with enormous post-Great Recession budget pressures, choose to invest mainly in programs that drive better standardized tests results. The rewards structure of public and private funding reinforces this industrial age mentality. This appears justified when studies, such as the one conducted by Kuncel and Nezlett (Standardized Tests Predict Graduate Student's Success,) suggest that standardized admissions test are valid predictors of "valid predictors of many aspects of student success across academic and applied fields." If we take a factory view of educatio by Apr 8
Swarm Intelligence versus Production Line Repression
Fordist production dehumanises people working in it, alienating them from their behaviour, generating stress and negative reactions, and divides people into controllers and controlled. Worker coops struggle to manage these tensions.
Organisation based on swarm intelligence is different. It looks to the 'intelligent' behaviour of social insects, where non-intelligent single insects working socially, can create extraordinarily complex organisations - two way highways, brutally efficient foraging behaviour, organised defence strategies, bridges over obstacles, complicated division of labour and large and complicated physical structures like termite nests. by Apr 8
state or market? what links red star, cybersyn and flower market? « nights of labour
It is in the 1980s that the correlation between efficiency and planning lost complete legitimacy. What was the motive of capitalist development suddenly became an impediment to it. And one did not even have to be right-wing neoliberal or Hayekian in order to attack planning as the source of bureaucratic inefficiencies or economic crises (see Hayek, 1944 for a hostile critique of Soviet planning). Through a delightful analysis of eight different cases including Europe, Africa and Soviet Russia, James Scott (1998) showed that top-down and centrally planned state projects are condemned to fail both in socialist and capitalist systems alike. On the other hand, despite declining credibility, state-led planning received a positive endorsement by institutionalist economists who praised the developmental bureaucrats of the East Asian countries as the major driving force behind the competitive performance of the region (Amsden, 1989; Chang, 2002). According to this view, planning enhances, rath by Apr 8
Dynamic and Non-linear Theory of Institutional Emergence
There are five ways of organising: the hierarchical, the egalitarian, the individualistic, the fatalistic and the autonomous. Each approach is a way of disorganising the other four: without the other four, it would have nothing to organise itself against. In Organising and Disorganising, Michael Thompson gives a detailed explanation of the dynamics of these five fundamental arrangements that underlie 'Cultural Theory'.Blurbs .. about 'Organising and Disorganising'
His main message is that there is no such thing as an organization: only ways of organizing and disorganizing and that there are only five ideal type ways of doing such activity: the hierarchical, the individualistic, the egalitarian, the fatalistic and the autonomous.
by Apr 6
Beyond boom and bust - diagrams
why should there be just two ways of organising if, as economists and political scientists have long argued, there are four kinds of goods: private, public, common-pool and club (see Figure 1). by Apr 6
Cultural Theory with Michael Thompson
Michael Thompson and Matthew Taylor discuss how cultural theory can offer a new economic paradigm by Apr 6
"To seek control at the level we do is the ultimate waste of resources." UrbanSurvival Letter by billfulk Apr 7