Introduction


Walter W. Powell (2001) labels these times as "confusing" and continues "The pace of economic and technological change appears relentless, but the direction is unfamiliar" (p. 2). We need to dig into these changes, and better understand them, in order to improve our ability to navigate and govern this turbulence. Once we have cleared the way from the frictionless accounts of these transformations (Mandelli, 2004), we still remain with the need to answer important research questions:

  1. What kind of change are network technologies bringing about in the organization of society and the economy?

  2. Are these changes going to transform economic governance toward more cooperative forms based on trust?

  3. What kind of changes are these new forms of governance going to produce in management philosophy and practices?

We will begin to answer these questions, structuring them in a narrower issue: "how the new network-based forms of coordination emerge, and how can they change the management of value exchange dynamics on complex cognitive networks?"

New institutions do not form through costless trust and order-for-free self-organization, but are managed as complex evolutionary value networks. We introduce this concept, building on Castelfranchi's (2000) idea that social order in network societies emerge from a complex interplay between self-organized market dynamics and central and formal social control. With this we also include Castelfranchi's (1998) idea that trust relationships in networks are both calculated and altruistic, and both intentional and emergent. In Rullani and Vicari (1999) and Vicari (2001), organizational networks are conceived as evolutionary complex systems with which we integrate the study of the economics of relationship and mediation (Mandelli, 2001, 2003). This integration allows us to explain phenomena only partially interpretable as non-hierarchical, self-organized or socially reciprocal, based on trust, rather than hierarchies and prices. We want to discover the management principles in society where we conceive businesses as complex evolutionary value networks, and where governance forms are often network-based.

Our claim is that network-based forms of governance are more often explained by economic and political-economic reasons than by social reasons, even though trust plays a strategic role in their formation and coordination. Trust is not the basis of a one-size-fits-all and socially correct form of organizing. Flexibility and restless creative re-combinations of socio-culturally constructed maps of the world are powerful competitive ammunitions and are at least as important as the fair-exchange goals for explaining network formation and performance. The answer to a complex question cannot be simple.

In order to dig deep into the new governance and business models, based on networks, it is necessary to rely on an interdisciplinary theoretical platform. This involves theories from management studies, information studies, organization studies, communication studies and natural science:

  1. transaction-cost theory (Williamson, 1975);

  2. the network marketing philosophy (Gronroos, 1995; Hakansson & Snehota, 1995);

  3. the studies on the development of inter-firm networks conceived as social networks (Powell, 1990; Grandori & Soda, 1995; Granovetter, 1973; Adler & Kwon, 2002);

  4. the resource-based view of strategy (Barney, 1991; Barney & Hansen, 1994; Vicari, 1991,1995; Busacca & Castaldo, 1996; Costabile, 2001) applied to networks (McEvily & Chakravarthy, 2002; Castaldo, 2002);

  5. the neo-institutionalism in policy studies (Di Maggio & Powell, 1983; Powell, 2001; DiMaggio, 2001);

  6. the evolutionary-path dependent approach to innovation and strategy (Nelson & Winter, 1982);

  7. the socio-cultural approach to mass communication and media gatekeeping (Carey, 1989; Entman, 1993; McCombs et al., 1997; Semetko & Mandelli, 1997; Norris, 2002);

  8. the study of trust dynamics and social order in multi-agent systems (Castelfranchi, 1998; Castelfranchi & Falcone, 1999; Castelfranchi, 2000);

  9. the theory of complex evolutionary systems (Kauffman, 1990; Kelly, 1994; Axelrod & Cohen, 1999; Rullani & Vicari, 1999).

This chapter has a broad theory-building goal. Therefore the major efforts are placed on developing a conceptually coherent theoretical framework and on finding critical room for further research.




L., Iivonen M. Trust in Knowledge Management Systems in Organizations2004
WarDriving: Drive, Detect, Defend, A Guide to Wireless Security
ISBN: N/A
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 143

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