The Future of Work - Malone

The Malone reading mirrors in some ways for me the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki that suggests that collobration and groups are the decision makers of the future and that the quality of decisions is improved because of this trend. I tend to accept Malone's agrument that we are moving in a more decentrailized decision-making environment and that his three main forces of transition (cost of communicaiton, availablity of information and power of computation) are indeed major reasons why collobration is more possible.

Malone's description of moving from a command-and-control management style to developing skills in cooridnate-and-cultivate is an especially useful description of the practical consequences of this new enviornment of how "work gets done". Understanding these ideas have ramifications not just for managers, but also for public adminstrators. If we accept the idea that crowds make better decisions, and that true democracy ensures freedoms and reflects that public's values, then encouraging, coordinating and cultivating citizen particpation becomes an important endeavor and a focus for the would-be public adminstrator and politicians.

I do question however, Malone's arguement of how our ogranizational structures have moved from Bands to Kingdoms, to Democracies. Malone emphasized the role that "people's values making these changes desirable." played in creation of larger more centralized groups. I don't question that falling communication costs made these changes "possible". But the argument that bigger organziations formed because it gave people things they wanted for me seems to minimize the role that old fashioned, base instinct power played in the development of these larger, more centralized organizations. The desire for power by a few (or even one) probably was a greater (and still is today in some places) catalyst for centralizing organizations. To quote The Refreshments "I've got the pistols, so I'll keep the pesos. Yeah, that seems fair", I believe Malone fails in this fundamental analysis of WHY roving bands moved to kingdoms, and thus larger, more centralized organizationial structures. I'd also argue that communciation costs had little to nothing to do with why these larger organizations were centralized under an emporer, chief or king. It was nothing more complicated than simple human base desire for power. To Malone's credit, he does acknowledge that people probably didn't concsionsly choose to give up their freedoms as hunter/gatherers in order to obtain the economic and military benefits of larger, centralized hierarchies. But this is only a small acknowldgement and not part of his core thesis.

Instead, perhaps falling communication costs, and rising access to information is diluting the power that a few, centralized decision-makers CAN have over the masses. If knowldge and information is power, and it is now freely available, then we all have power. This new world REQUIRES decsion-making to become more distributed and decentralized.