Chapter 10: Self-Organization and New Hierarchies in Complex Evolutionary Value Networks

Andreina Mandelli
SDA Bocconi Graduate School of Management, Italy

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Abstract

This chapter, with a broad theory building goal, addresses these two questions: "how the new network-based forms of coordination emerge, and how can they change the management of value exchange dynamics on complex cognitive networks?" We can find a useful answer by using an interdisciplinary approach. New institutions do not form through costless trust and order-for-free self-organization (the invisible hand of the market), but are managed as complex evolutionary value networks. This conceptual framework can help managers to design more cooperative structures and nodes to negotiate network structure and power. The design of the network matters. The network is the locus of learning but also the locus of social negotiation. The new institutions can be designed, even if this design looks more like a monitorial learning process and a design of the infomediation infrastructure than the well structured plans of old-fashioned management. The new network governance forms, and the logics that wants to build organizations as flexible and loosely-coupled systems of self-organized peripheries, also require that we build a new "ethics of network management" agenda.