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TABLE OF CONTENTS
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ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
PERVASIVE DIGITALIZATION
FLUID ORGANIZATION
REFERENCES
ABSTRACT
The need for supporting the personal feelings of myself as non frequentante studente
lavoratore with experts views about plausible dynamics of organizing in 20 years
from now, brought me to the search of qualified recent forward looking studies related
to my job together with reading course materials.
The conclusions of this overview lead me to be confident that GLOBAL CONNECTIVITY and
WEB 3.0, 4.0 are the most likely dynamic features of future organizing that are associated
with the use of digital technologies .
Then I engaged myself in developing a sociological argument for each one of the two
above dynamics as string of logically-connected statements about conditions and
contexts that are likely to be typical organizing assemblages in 20 years and why this
set of conditions/contexts is likely to produce the dynamic identified.
My preference is for structuration theory, based on special attention generally given
to the intentions of the human actors. (Other ways to account for dynamics would
include the practice lens and Actor Network Theory (ANT), in its several forms).
INTRODUCTION
Discovering something that might be characteristic of the dynamics of organizing in 20
years from now is a very hard task at today crisis times, when we feel that the weight
of unsolved problems (financial troubles,
sustainable development, jobless
economy,) and rapid societal change (globalization of commerce and culture,
proliferation and speed of information, evolution of technology and transport) have
built up to the point that the need of a new paradigm (T.KUHN, 1970) replacing the
old one is perceived.
Many forward looking studies developed by public institutions, research companies,
professional associations and industry are looking for options and opportunities for
change before the business is forced to change" (WILLENIUS, 2008).
The background set up through the course materials, the main findings of some recent
qualified forward looking studies in Europe and in US (EUROPEAN COMMISSION,
2011; INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE, 2011) and some papers advancing concepts
redefining the possibilities and transforming the nature of organizations (SABETY,
2009; SABETY, 2011; ELLEN MACARTHUR FOUNDATION, 2012) draw a challenging
framework for matching personal feelings as a worker and at the same time as a
student with more objective indications in taking a world view of the driving
forces for change and how specific key forces are affecting the current structure and
future development of the organizations.
These dynamic features refer in their turn to many items of the ranked list set up at
the workshop on the course examination, like:
The virtual will be the main form of organizations, FLOSS, The rise of network
organizations means they will shrink in size, have a flatter hierarchy, be less controlled
and be more focused on a core business, Organizations will have fewer boundaries,
may be lose them altogether and will be much more like social networks, Typical
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business process will have moved to cyberfacture. Jobs will change greatly: e.g. be
more flexible, with no fixed location, hours, even pay, For the worker, achieving a
good work/life balance will be easier, because it will be policy and because the
separation of work from home will decline.
In the following two section I describe the 2 features PERVASIVE DIGITALIZATION and
FLUID ORGANIZATION of the dynamics of organizing in 20 years and try to construct a
sociologically persuasive argument for why I believe this is likely to be true.
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FLUID ORGANIZATION
Driving forces for change at the global level are interacting between them and create
turbulence and dynamics influencing first of all the lives of the people.
The organizations are the fundamental blocks of society and most human activities
take place through them to meet different needs. At the highest level, business,
government and social sectors dominate the organizational landscape of most
developed economies.
Organizations are products of human design and as such they reflect the cultural
norms, values, priorities and context out of which they are created. The today
organizational models were designed at a time when the world was a very different
place : many different driving forces of rapid societal change have combined to create
a new massively interdependent global culture and economy and organizations are
facing heavy pressures to adjust to a number of challenges worsening of the quality
of our natural environment, declining of the social capital, growing disparity between
rich and poor, etc. - which are ultimately by products and unintended consequences of
organizational design. There is growing recognition that these systemic problems are
rooted in structural failures at the organizational level: solving these problems requires
new ways of thinking and acting on the part of individuals along with new
organizational designs that encourage stakeholders actions consistent with long-term
welfare of our ecological, economic and social systems.
I consider the work in the enterprises as motor of the economy and how dynamics of
enterprises and economy are evolving under new needs and awareness.
New technologies and social media platforms are driving an unprecedented
reorganization of how we produce and create value.
Amplified by a new level of collective intelligence and tapping resources embedded in
social connections with multitudes of others, we can now achieve the kind of scale and
reach previously attainable only by very large organizations.
In other words, we can do things outside of traditional organizational boundaries.
To superstruct means to create structures that go beyond the basic forms and
processes with which we are familiar. It means to collaborate and play at extreme
scales, from the micro to the massive. Learning to use new social tools to work, to
invent, and to govern at these scales is what the next few decades are all about.
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Our tools and technologies shape the kinds of social, economic, and political
organizations we inhabit. Many organizations we are familiar with today, including
educational and corporate ones, are products of centuries-old scientific knowledge
and technologies. Today we see this organizational landscape being disrupted.
In health, organizations such as Curetogether and PatientsLikeMe are allowing people
to aggregate their personal health information to allow for clinical trials and
emergence of expertise outside of traditional labs and doctors offices. In these days
Salvatori Iaconesi, a technology expert with a brain cancer, has started a FLOSS
practice to stimulate participation in finding a solution for his illness.
Science games, from Foldit to GalaxyZoo, are engaging thousands of people to solve
problems no single organization had the resources to do before. Open education
platforms are increasingly making content available to anyone who wants to learn.
A new generation of organizational concepts and work skills is coming not from
traditional management/organizational theories but from fields such as game design,
neuroscience, and happiness psychology. These fields will drive the creation of new
training paradigms and tools.
But there is another aspect that has to be considered: skills to coping cultural changes.
Weve seen that the pervasive digitalization will bring us to change the way we
communicate, with rise of new literacies. Moreover it will reduce the need of
organization to be structured around physical places.
All this considerations involve a tremendous change of what we call culture.
In fact, according with Schein, culture is a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the
group learned as it solved its problems that has worked well enough to be considered
valid and is passed on to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel
in relation to those problems. Schein culture model contains three layers:
Artifacts, that are the visible elements in a culture. Artifacts can be recognized by
people not part of the culture. Artifacts can e.g. be dress codes, furniture, art, work
climate, stories, work processes, organizational structures etc. The outsider might
easily see these artifacts, but might not be able to fully understand why these artifacts
have been established. To understand this, outsiders can look at the espoused values
in the culture.
Espoused values are the values normally espoused by the leading figures of a culture.
Espoused values could e.g. be represented by the philosophies, strategies and goals
sought realized by e.g. leaders. However, the values sought by leaders should be
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supported by some general and shared assumptions about e.g. how a company should
be run, or how employees should be managed. If espoused values by leaders are not in
line with the general assumptions of the culture, this might signal trouble.
Assumptions reflects the shared values within the specific culture. These values are
often ill-defined, and will oftentimes not be especially visible to the members of the
culture. Assumptions and espoused values are possibly not correlated, and the
espoused values may not at all be rooted in the actual values of the culture. This may
cause great problems, where the differences between espoused and actual values may
create frustrations, lack of morale and inefficiency. Core assumptions can e.g. be
assumptions regarding the human nature, human relationships etc.
I want to pay attention to the symbolic artifacts. Symbolic artifacts can assume several
forms that can fit in three categories: organizational practices, communication,
physical artifacts.
How this categories of symbolic artifact (I will consider only physical one in this work),
are affected by the rise of new kind of fluid organization?
Pervasive digitalization and environment fast transformation push organizations to be
extremely flexible. It means that we will be in front of an hardly tuned version of what
Mintzberg describes as adhocracy that seems to be the kind of organization used for
FLOSS projects.
In primis workplaces, as physical artifacts, will be subjected to important
transformations. Generally, workplaces send cultural messages to organizations
members, like where they are, what is the expected behavior, even who they are or
what is their personal, team or organizational identity, what is their status.
Thanks to pervasive digitalization, organizations members can make their own activity
not only in given places but potentially everywhere. Referring to work activities, this
means that work can be configured as deskless job. So, many of us, will be allowed do
work from home. Domestication of work will be a challenge, because combine more
worker freedom but an invisible subordination. If work will still represent the most
important part of our life we can suppose that digital workplaces can rapidly transform
our society in a placeless society.
Other aspects that will be subjected to important changes are communication (as
symbolic artifacts) and management of not synchronized time (as organizational
practice). Unfortunately my time is expired!
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DOBBS R. OPPENHEIM J. THOMPSON F. (2012), MOBILIZING FOR RESOURCE
REVOLUTION
ELLEN MACARTHUR FOUNDATION (2012), TOWARDS THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY
EUROPEAN COMMISSION (2011), EUROPEAN FORWARD LOOKING ACTIVITIES:
building the future of Innovation Union and European Research Area , 2011
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