Will Davies

This feels a bit like tag-team wrestling... [man in iSociety-branded leotard gingerly clambers between the ropes and sets about opponent]

I can barely find anything that I disagree with here, but there's quite a bit which is left unsaid. THis almost goes with the territory of network analysis, because it's (deliberately) a very stripped down school of sociology - it ignores political questions of power and legitimacy, just as it ignores economic questions of wealth. Within it's strict limits it's difficult to quarrel with it, but the problems begin where mathematical or biological or software models start to be extended into territories where they don't belong.

The value in the Freeman paper is that it shows the micro-hierarchies which develop in cultures which deem themselves unhierarchical. As you point out "we?re beginning to understand how this structuring without structures takes place", but only in a purely descriptive sense. We see who is connected, who isn't; we see how information circulates. But we don't discover *how* somebody came to be connected (their parents? their charisma? their 'talent'?) and often end up plumping for the most mystical answer (their 'talent') which ducks the question.

So the nature of power and influence is left unexplored, and its legitimacy left uncontested. What theories of emergence can't deal with is that human beings are political - they set about creating hierarchies and power relations, which are *not* chaotic, *not* unplanned. Where formal structures and hierarchies are removed, informal ones take their place. This is never accidental - we take decisions over what kind of society we wish to live in. Even if we wanted to live in an unplanned way, we couldn't.

The argument that some of us would make is that informal types of hierarchy are less transparent, less fair and less progressive than the types of hierarchy which formal constitutions and formal processes create.

So networks are never actually flat and never actually self-organising, but have leaders and organisers. The question is: what's the best way for society to *select* its leaders and organisers.

If we take Max Weber's three models of political legitimacy, we have three answers available:
- traditional legitimacy - the leaders are those who have always been in charge (or claim as much)
- bureaucratic legitimacy - the leaders are those who are most effective at getting things done.
- charismatic legitimacy - the leaders are those who have some mystical ability to attract people.

I'd argue that the third one is the model of political legitimacy for the network society. After the Tories simultaneously dismantled both their own claim to aristocratic legitimacy (by shagging in Chelsea kits) and the State's claim to bureaucratic legitimacy (by, er, dismantling it), charismatic legitimacy is what New Labour and its friendly think tanks :-) have replaced it with.

[tired man in leotard finds he has tried one 'body slam' too many, and clambers back out of ring]

crabtree crabtree

[While the referee is watching an imaginary dispute on the other side of the ring the second man in iSociety-branded leotard ? to gasps from a crowd, chants of *fight**fight**fight* and one man thinking ?won?t this skinny one snap in two?? ? bounds into the ring].

I agree with most of what has been said. We have no beef with DEMOS' work ? to be honest we haven?t seen it, although I like Chapman?s book ? but we?re using you as a vicarious target for a debate with a complex strawman. In iSociety language this is known as a ?chat spillover?. We are in the slightly invidious position of being enthusiasts for this sort of thing, who have become worried that we mustn?t get carried away, like last time. That said, seconds away?.

In Michael Frayn?s Copenhagen, and numerous other pieces of literature, authors mooch on nukes and human agency. How can these great and noble men, they ask, be so blind to the consequences of their brilliance?

Why Copenhagen? It?s a good metaphor. ?Copenhagen, for all its dazzling references to some of the most challenging ideas of modern physics, is in many respects a very old-fashioned play. It is, in a sense, a whodunit, an attempt to reconstruct an event after the fact based on the available evidence ? a detailed attempt to arrive at a clear understanding of a particular human action in a particular place long after the event.?

This is what complexity theory is. Firstly, it?s a whodunit first, rather than a whydoit. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Secondly, as in Copenhagen, the consequences can outweigh the intent. This is the real problem.

Will and my argument is simple. The network society has a dark side we haven't come to terms with yet. Networks are wonderfully efficient at doing some things. But they *must* to some extent rely on aesthetic rather than democratic criteria in governance, because democracy is impossible without structure.

The ultimate irony, it seems to us, is that network enthusiasm is anti-reductionist reductionism. In economics, there is a blazing analogous debate about the relative merits of reductionism. Not being an economist this all had to be explained twice before I boiled it down to: is it smart to be dumb? Should you make assumptions and reduce a problem to a level in which you can solve it, because otherwise it insoluble. Or should you try and bit off the whole thing in one bigger bit?

Complexity theory, from its name onwards, implicitly thumbs its nose at reductionism. It says things are really complicated, and we need to understand them as such. This is fine, and as Paul argues, technology and mathematical modelling (as detailed at length in that rash of books about Kevin Bacon last year) have developed to explain more complex systems. We can now prove I?m X [when x>1

Kate Oakley

At the risk of stating the bleedin' obvious, I'd say that the approch you adopt depends on a.the unit of analysis b.the degree of consensus about outcomes and c.what you are trying to do.

If for example you are trying to improve the performance of a school (and assuming here a fair degree of consensus about what makes a 'good' school eg.happy kids, developing some social skills and getting a few GCSEs on the way...), then a network analysis of that school - who talks to who? who's an influencer? how does the school sit within the wider network of schools? is damm useful. On the other hand knowing there is power inbalance between kids and teachers, parents and teachers, teachers and DfES etc is relevent and true, but not THAT helpful.

If, on the other hand, you are trying to reform world trade, then saying that the WTO should be a complex adaptive system seems to me to miss the point. The WTO is complex, the reasons why it is not sufficient adapative are all to do with power inbalances, who benefits from the current set-up, the nature of global capital etc - a discussion of globalisation without reference to power and to inequality is meaningless. Reforming world trade rules may well require an understanding of complex system, but it wouldn't be enough.

Paul Paul

The trouble with these bloody debates is that they move too quickly, so I have to keep rewriting what I want to say to take account of what has just been said.

I want to start by questioning whether the Freeman article is really an appropriate basis for this discussion, and then deal with some of Will and James?s points.

It seems bizarre to try to defend hierarchy by analogies to women?s political movements in the 1970s. Of course hierarchies are pretty good at doing some things, whether it?s women?s lib or making model-T fords or making war. They wouldn?t have come to be the dominant organisational form of the 20th century if they weren?t.

But let?s be fair to Freeman. By structurelessness, she does not mean networks. What she means is anarchy. She is attacking the idealistic notion of a radically democratic organisational form that claimed to be entirely equal, which she rightly says is a cipher. The way I read the article, she explicitly sees networks as a form of structure, albeit one that often operates invisibly and in potentially very unhealthy ways when membership of this network is determined by ?friendship?. It?s quite right that networks can be the most crucial organising principle even if there are other more formal systems supposedly at work. When we talk about the ?old boys? network? what we mean is that there may well be formal meritocratic procedures in place but that invisible links privilege some people over others. But as I argue below, the ?old boys network? also illustrates the crudeness of the notion that making procedures more formal or explicit necessarily makes them more fair.

Freeman also assumes that greater capacity to make decisions equals greater capacity to get things done. This is wrong. Her argument ?diffusion of ideas does not mean they are implemented; it only means they are talked about? could apply equally to hierarchies, as anyone who has ever sat in a committee of any kind will know. Finally, her last section ?principles of democratic structuring? should be re-entitled ?principles of creating lots of committees?. If anyone seriously wants to adopt those as the basis of a blueprint for government, then they?d need to explain how they would lead to anything different to what we have now.

A much more interesting place to start is with Ronald Coase?s classic paper on the theory of the firm. His argument runs that markets and hierarchies actually share common transactional practices (i.e. those between buyer and seller are not necessarily different than those between the marketing dept. and the manufacturing dept. of a firm). The difference is the amount of asset specificity ? knowledge about the transaction ? that is required. Exchanges that were more uncertain (requiring greater knowledge about the transaction) took place within the firm where the risks of this uncertainty could be mitigated. Exchanges where this kind of certainty was not needed could take place in markets. Mark Granovetter?s seminal contribution in kickstarting network theory from the social science point of view was to show that there was an alternative organisational form ? the network. Here asset specificity was embedded in trust relationships between different members of the network ? it didn?t matter if you didn?t know everything about the transaction because you knew you could trust the person you were dealing with. In other words, here is an organisational form that offers the potential for balancing the co-ordination of activity in a complex and uncertain environment that hierarchies provided, with the fluidity and flexibility which were the basis of markets.

The Castells thesis is essentially an exposition of why in the current period this characteristic has given networks a comparative advantage over hierarchies in doing certain things, and especially in moving information around a system quickly. (For what it?s worth, I agree with Will and James? slight scepticism about the speed with which Castells has become the unchallenged gospel. For our purposes here, it?s a bit tragic that the proliferation of elegant and accessible writers on networks have come largely from a natural rather than social science background).

But none of this is an argument that hierarchies are no longer important (in many ways they are more powerful than ever ? Geoff Mulgan?s essay in the collection will make this point very powerfully), nor that networks are necessarily empowering and democratic. In fact, the ?hierarchies bad, networks good? debate really smacks of those pointless ?engineering is better than physics? type arguments that students have, until they all start picking on the guy that does business studies. Hierarchies clearly remain much better than networks at doing all sorts of things ? why else would network enthusiasts be forced to resort to Visa everytime they want to illustrate a successful network business? The question is, are networks better than hierarchies at doing other things, and are these other things becoming increasingly important?

The answer that Tom Bentley and others are coming to is that network-based approaches have two distinct advantages over hierarchies in the current period. The first is that they are better at dealing with the complexity of organisational life, because they devolve decision-making to the front-line, shorten feedback loops, and thus push the management of complexity further down the system (in Stafford Beer?s terms, helping to match variety with variety). The second speaks directly to Will and James? points about values: command-and-control treats people in instrumental ways (as cogs in the machine), which is deeply problematic when individualism and autonomy are increasingly prized values in modern society.

Turning to some of Will and James? specific points. Will?s right that lazily treating biological systems and human systems as identical is problematic. But it?s worth emphasising how broad ?network theory? really is, and not throwing the baby out with the bath water. For example, it does not ignore wealth. See Mark?s Buchannen?s Statesman article applying the well-known ?rich get richer? phenomenon in network theory to explain persistent inequalities of personal wealth.

Nor does it ignore power. The policy network and governance literature in political science is rooted in the notion of ?power dependence?. Its central contribution is to point out the way in which the power to get things done is increasingly distributed and dispersed amongst a range of actors drawn from within but also beyond government. None of these actors has all the resources it needs to achieve its goals ? each depends on the capacities and resources of others, and each possesses capacities and resources which others need. But crucially, this power dependence approach helps us to see how those who do not have resources that others need can be and often are excluded from crucial decision-making arenas ? as well as to show how those without formal political power are able to have such influence.

I understand what Will means when he says ?The argument that some of us would make is that informal types of hierarchy are less transparent, less fair and less progressive than the types of hierarchy which formal constitutions and formal processes create.? But you cannot magic away networks by introducing formal procedures. In fact, the real danger is to fail to recognise the difference between the way things are supposed to work and the way that they actually do work. That?s the real lesson from the debacle of DETR and other forms of ?joined-up government? ? just because people are supposed to work in a certain way on the organogram doesn?t mean that they are. If you can understand how networks are working (or not working) then you can start to influence them, build them, reshape them or destroy them. But I don?t think you do it by formalising hierarchy.

The governance literature also has some important implications for Will?s points about legitimacy. A real problem it recognises is that our mental models and assumptions about how politics works and the legitimacy of governing institutions simply does not tally with the emerging reality of policy-making in the network society, in which a widening array of public and private organisations at multiple tiers of society are involved in creating public goods and services, and in which government?s capacity to actually control social outcomes is strictly circumscribed by the complexity of the systems in which it is operating. Simple models of accountability and legitimacy based on voting politicians out of office once every few years are not sufficient, but no one is quite clear what the alternative should be. In that sense, CSR is really an attempt to grope towards a fuzzier notion of who should be held to account, and how. Weber?s bureaucratic legitimacy is really about leaders whose authority is vested in the rules, standard procedures and rational decision-making trees that hierarchy provides. In a world in which our awareness of the limitations of the potential for ?rational? decision-making is greater than ever, I?m not sure how much help ol? Max can be.

Next, there is a well-worn debate within political science about whether or not networks are explanatory or simply descriptive. Do networks in themselves explain anything, or are the key characteristics of networks determined exogenously? If you?re interested, try and get hold of Political Studies (I forget which issues) from last year, which featured a pretty rabid debate between Keith Dowding, Martin Smith, David Marsh and others. It may be stating the bleedin? obvious, as Kate puts it, but I think it?s horses for courses. It depends what you are trying to explain.

There is some discussion in all the responses so far about what this means for government. My own view is that government remains absolutely crucial as a condenser of the values and moral purpose that will determine the direction in which we try and steer our complex social systems. But the point is that its legitimacy and effectiveness in performing that role will depend on it adopting a radically different approach to how policy is produced. Nurturer of links may not be quite the right phrase; but the underlying image of a central government apparatus focused on system-wide learning and the creation and sharing of knowledge should not be dismissed lightly. Government is starting to admit that the man in Whitehall does not know best, but that is only part of the battle. It needs to recognise its potential role in catalysing and spreading successful local innovations across whole systems of public policy. Until it does that, it will not be able to respond to the David Walker critique that isolated localism is often much more unfair than cumbersome centralism.

The final part of Will and James? critique I want to mention is that network theory which draws on biological systems does not reflect the real world of human systems populated by purposeful, occasionally irrational political animals. But does economics, with its assumptions about rational, self-interested actors? And more importantly for this debate, does scientific management, on which the massive hierarchies of the 20th century were founded? Fordism/Taylorism assumed that problems were best solved by breaking them down into ever smaller parts, and creating more and more specialist functions to deal with them. This is reflected in the functional silos of the state. But the difference between the production line and the social world is that real problems do not come neatly packaged up in this way. They are messy, touching on the jurisdictions of many different geographical areas, disciplines, institutions and so on. The difficulty we face in dealing with these problems reflects this mismatch between their cross-cutting character and our highly specialised forms of knowledge and institution. The value of complexity/systems theory is in helping us to understand how the relationships and connections between things are as important as the things themselves.

As pretty much everyone has argued, network theory isn?t going to solve all our problems. Network theorists (esp. the mathematicians) are scariest to me when they conjure up an image of a world which can be entirely explained in numbers. But if it helps us to think more holistically, it is a vital step in the right direction.

Will Davies

"In a world in which our awareness of the limitations of the potential for ?rational? decision-making is greater than ever, I?m not sure how much help Max Weber can be."

You didn't address my very last point which was (to rephrase it) that the veneer of organisational flatness hides the peaks and troughs of personality dynamics. Max Weber was very well aware of this fact: there is an alternative to "rational decision-making", and it emerges from the (irrational) cult of personality. Was it really a coincidence that the cult of the CEO coincided with a flattening of US corporations over the course of the 90s? No. After bureaucracy becomes a dirty word, people seek to fill the void with 'talent', 'charisma' and other mystical, non-rational entities which, incidentally, lead to widening wage inequalities once they manifest themselves as winner-take-all markets or a 'war for talent'.

Trying to apply scientific methods to this aspect of social networks is like trying to store smoke in an iron cage. Mysticism has arisen precisely out of dissatisfaction with rationalist, bureaucratic forms of social organisation, so to attempt to take possession of it by an even more elaborate science (complexity theory in this case) misses the point. Reason can't take possession of unreason.

Paul Paul

A great many organisations that claim to be flat are actually concentrating power more than ever - I agree, and said so above.

The network society can be deeply disempowering, and can concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few - again, I agree and Mark Buchanen's paper explains that from a network theory point of view.

I suppose the point I'm making about Weber is that if we accept complexity (i.e. systems respond in a non-linear, and unpredictable fashion) as our frame of reference then in some ways the bureaucratic and charismatic bases of legitimacy are converging, because both depend on an illegitimate claim to truth or to have the "right" answers, rooted either in a cult of the personality or the bureaucratic mentality that the people at the top know best. Again, I'm not knocking hierarchy per se - when I'm in A&E I want the most senior doctor to be calling the shots. But when we're talking about reforming the NHS, I'd rather it wasn't being driven by Whitehall targets.

Incidentally, the alternative to my rather caricatured notion of rational decision-making is not necessarily the cult of the personality. There is an alternative model of leadership, and it's set out brilliantly by Ron Heifetz in Leadership Without Easy Answers, which does exactly what it says on the tin. And it is a vision rooted in the progressive values of self governance which James' espoused earlier.

Finally, let's not confuse understanding with control. The project of western science since the enlightenment has been to understand the world so that it could be controlled. The "even more elaborate science" of complexity theory does seek to arrive at a new understanding of how the world works. But it is quite explicit that this is not so we should be able to control it better - rather that we might become more aware and more respecful about how our actions shape its outcomes. Brian Goodwin at Schumacher College expresses this sentiment far more elegantly than I can in his plea for a shift from Control to Participation Via A Science of Qualities.

Bill Thompson

Scroll up. No further - to the Demos organisation diagram. Has the node on the far left - the one who has only worked with two other people - been fired yet? In a network s/he would be; in a hierarchy s/he is the boss....

[more serious comment to come, when I've read the rest and watched the vid of Copenhagen. But my waters tell me that you're both wrong...]

Interesting you should ask Bill. The person on the left is a Demos Associate, as are most of the people around the edges of the diagram. These are people who aren't full time members of staff but who work with us from time to time on specific projects. He definitely hasn't been fired and (as far as I know) he's not the boss. As with all our associates he's in fact incredibly well connected to people outside the organisation and acts as a great 'router' of ideas into and out of Demos.

I think your question higlights the limitations of this networks stuff as a tool of analysis - we wouldn't dream of using the individual data you can get from the excercise because it's so obviously simplistic on its own. That's not to say some people wouldn't; there are some interesting articles by Karen Stephenson (another contributor to the networks collection) about how similar techniques can be used in the selection of senior appointments in large companies. I say 'interesting' because I'm really not sure about the ethics of doing it like that.

I think more useful from a policy point of view is understanding the overall patterns and properties of networks.

crabtree crabtree

6000 words later, and we are really getting somewhere. I?ve just finished Paul S?s comments, and think they move us forward a good deal. I will respond, like Bill, a little later when I have more time. I want to disagree with Paul?s point on Freeman, though, which seems churlish (although very fair in detail). It must be legitimate to use theory from the 1970s, otherwise your recourse to Granovetter et al is ?bizarre? too. I don?t agree Freeman is talking about anarchy per se either. But, that is a very minor point, because your critique of her arguments is excellent.

But I thought I?d throw in a few ?Facts? and then try to put down what I think we agree on so far.

Fact 1. An American writer told me recently that both Cap Gemini and Accenture had mothballed their extensive research on complexity, because they couldn?t make it work on the real world. They had invested millions in this, but my friend suggested it had proved exceptionally hard to find ways in which it really added value. This may be Game Set and Match in favour of it, of course, if nasty consultants can?t make a quick buck.

Fact 2. The European Commisison Fraud investigations, looking at the statistics function at present, is going to be an intriguing example of what we are discussing. Basically, it is rife with ?corruption?. This isn?t always corruption in the official sense. What I hear is happening is that, in order to get anything done, Commission officials have long created shadow structures which get round the bureaucracy of the official structures. These are more network based, and get things done. But, obviously, they are neither formally legitimate, nor open to scrutiny. And although most of What Goes On is benign, you obviously get some incidences of problems, be they straight malfeasance, or aesthetic decision making. I think DEMOS, when it all comes to light, might want to use it as a case study both of (a) how good structures work and (b) the problems of transitioning to a more networked environment.

OK. 9, possibly obvious, points of agreement.
1. Networks and Hierarchies perform different functions.
2. Networks as organisational forms are becoming more important, and are in tune with times.
3. Networks are good at doing some things, not others.
4. Network analysis can be a helpful addition to any policy makers too (although it isn?t clear how useful, when, or how often). This does not hide the fact that instrumental hierarchy isn?t great either.
5. Networks are neither inherently democratic or undemocratic. But they can be both, and if they become the latter its tricky to fix.
6. Kate?s points about the environment ? set up, consensus, objective ? are important preconditions for understanding which it is.
7. We need some new answers ? ?our mental models and assumptions about how politics works and the legitimacy of governing institutions simply does not tally with the emerging reality of policy-making in the network society?
8. We are in a period of transition, and we need to think very very carefully about the downsides of networked-based analysis, and network-centric structure.
9. People on the DEMOS network-ogram who look like they are billy-no-mates, are in fact very important. This illustrates a wider point about how careful we must be.

Obviously, there is more chat to come, but perhaps we might try to pick a few specific issues and try honing them down.

All of this is really interesting. I don't think I have lots of time to write a long comment, but there is a close to home example that i'd like to mention.

About a year ago I went to a research presentation about a research project that had been done about life at the many organisations on the Mezzanine. It was quite a small scale affair, but the most interesting thing that came out of it was about a network map that a representative of each organisation had been asked to complete about their links with other organisations on the Mezzanine.

What happened was this. one organisation believed that it had many more links to other organisations, and that other organisations had many more links to each other, than the other organisations had actually drawn. I'm not sure whether this says more about the Mezzanine or network theory, but it may be something useful to get hold of to complement our Demos network map and to illustrate that beliefs about networks can be hugely subjective.

Bill Thompson

I didn?t get round to watching ?Copenhagen? but I don?t think it really matters ? I?d only have got irritated with Frayn and the lack of historical perspective that others have identified [http://www.aip.org/pt/vol-53/iss-7/p28.html].

After all, without a sense of history and without a sense of context, our discussions are surely irrelevant and probably meaningless.

Which brings me neatly to our current debate.

Progressive politics is about the transparent and accountable exercise of power ? the assumption is generally made that if what is being done, by whom, to whom, is well-known and clearly understood, then social justice is more likely. What we?re trying to here is to understand the structures within which power inheres and how they function, so that we can both analyse existing power relations and design new structures which are able to hold and exercise power in a non-oppressive way.

In doing that, we seem to have settled on the diference between hierarchies and networks as the core question, with some flirting around ideas of complexity (vs simplicity) theory, and a smattering of reductionist science, policy making and feminist politics. It?s a nice mix.

However it seems to me that our central opposition is a misleading one, and that the distinction between network-centric organisations and rigid hierarchies is not as great as we are presenting it. In fact, I wonder whether we shouldn?t try to get rid of the distinction, so that we can do a bit of synthesis. We might even be able to use our theoretical tools more effectively and perhaps (unlike the big consultancies) start to learn how to apply complexity theory to the real world and come up with some useful ideas to be presented to those currently exercising power.

The first point I want to make is that both networks and hierarchies are graphs [http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/graph.html] in a strict mathematical sense ? a set of items (nodes) connected by edges (links).

A graph is a pretty basic mathematical concept, and networks and hierarchies differ in the detail, but they are fundamentally the same thing. While we should not read too much into this purely mathematical insight, topologists will tell you that sharing a deep structure is a good indication that two constructs have a lot in common. So will political scientists.

So I believe we should spend more time looking for similarities than we have done. We may find that many of the positive things that can be said about network-centric organisations may also apply to hierarchies, and many of the perceived negatives about hierarchies may also be found in network-centric organisations. For example, the comments about shadow-organisations and the way the apparent flows of information and control can be subverted by unseen links can apply just as much to a network. How many of the people in the Demos node actually know each other outside the formal structure? How many Demos associates work together on non-Demos projects, or were at university together, or are emotionally involved? None of this appears on the network diagram, just as it doesn?t appear on an organogram.

If we do this, we may also find that the tools which have been developed for undertanding networks and complex systems can be applied to rigid hierarchies with useful results, and vice versa.

As Paul (Miller) pointed out in the opening contribution, Demos doesn?t generally recommend rigid hierarchies as a way of solving problems in public policy, because hierarchies are ?very good at solving problems that involve achieving a single objective?.

It is worth asking why this is the case. It may be simply that the hierarchies are designed at a stage when the problem seems simple ? when it seems amenable to solution ? and only later does the true complexity emerge. And here the problem may not be that we cannot design hierarchies to solve complex problems but simply that hierarchies are more rigid than networks,and so the system as a whole is less adaptable.

That is, the problem may not be the way information flows around a graph or whether links are directional, but the dynamic nature of the network vs hierarchy: the idea that each node has a degree of autonomy and is capable of making, reinforcing, weakening or even breaking links on its own.

In a hierarchy, it is generally held, links can only be changed by a superior node or outside agency ? one of the major roles of think-tanks historically has indeed been to suggest changes to hierarchical institutions within Whitehall.

Perhaps it is possible to built self-organising hierarchical structures which have the dynamic qualities of the best networks ? indeed, perhaps that is what good managers do instinctively.

If we start to unpick the distinction, and to dismantle the question then we are, as those who know me will not be surprised to hear, getting into Wittgenstein territory. I have no fear of this, although I know others do. At least I haven?t started arguing that the meaning of a network is its pattern of use? yet.

And to return to Jo Freeman, as a veteran of the men?s movement in the 1980?s I can remember what it was like to be in groups riven by egalitarianism and committed to structurelessness, and how effective organisation often emerged, like a spontaneously generated mouse from a mixture of hay and dung, to take on a task or achieve a goal. Sometimes an imposed lack of structure is a necessary starting point for a truly effective organisation, simply because it forces everyone to think about what structures are really needed.

Matt Matt

This is all very clever stuff, and I won't be able to make head nor tale (sic) of it until I print it out, and maybe not even then.

Mentioning the play "Copenhagen" - the way it is structured might be interesting to you in terms of self-organisation and co-operation. I've only watched the TV version, but I was struck by the turn-taking structure that is employed to solve the whodunnit.

Robert Axelrod's "the evolution of cooperation" points to the turn taking pattern as a way in which cooperation can evolve between parties without an external hierarchy or power enforcing it.

Don't know if that's interesting or useful, and apologies if it's not - but it just popped in to my head while, I'm afraid, skimming this.

Ralph Musgrave

I have near perfect vision, but the print on this site/page of yours is too small to read
/knowledgebase/default.aspx?id=224

Layton Zach

Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.

Ong Brandon

Friendship make prosperity more shining and lessens adversity by dividing and sharing it.