CCK09: This third week of the Connectivism Course was once again packed with interesting reading material, discussions and presentations. It’s impossible to read and watch everything – but this was obvious from the very start of the course. Every participant has to find her or his own way. Earlier this week I tried to use the distinction between groups and networks to analyze the consequences of the scalability issues of Second Life. Another, not unrelated, topic I’d like to explore further is how the age of the networks which we are entering transforms the way we organize ourselves in institutions and companies.
Stephen Downes, who facilitates CCK09 together with George Siemens, just published a presentation (webpage includes audio) which criticizes the traditional view on outsourcing. Before you stop paying attention (it’s not the most sexy subject): this analysis really deals with fundamental shifts in civilization.
Outsourcing has been a hot topic also for those who develop a professional interest in virtual environments as tools for collaboration. Virtual worlds help to deterritorialize the world. Wherever you are, if you can get into a virtual environment with others, you share a same space with those others, even though this place is “immersive”, “synthetic” or “virtual” or whatever name one wants to give it.
This is important in a context of globalization. As Downes pointed out in his presentation, globalization these days means free movement of capital, of commodities, of almost everything except of human beings. If you’re born in Ghana, you’re kindly requested to stay there, especially if you are poor – while mobility could increase the chances of that individual to increase her living standard.
A more cynical use of virtual worlds could be that those who earn less and whose mobility is restricted in a world organized in nation-states, can still be integrated in the work flow of companies through virtual environments. Employees working in India could work for a European or American company as if they were actually in Europe or the US, but they would stay in India, so that the rich nation-states can tell trade unions and anti-immigration groups that they do everything they can to keep foreigners out of the national labor markets.
The traditional thinking about outsourcing focuses on companies entering into contracts with other companies, joint ventures, investing in subsidiaries (captive centers). It is a way of thinking which often seems to suppose that the current main-stream forms of management, power and control are unchallenged.
Traditional companies seem to share a number of the characteristics of what Downes calls groups: they try to speak with one voice, they try to be coherent, they are not open etc. He contrasts this with networks which celebrate diversity, autonomy, openness and interaction (this use of the word “group” is challenged by others in the course).
David Ronfeldt has a more complex model but the underlying message seems to be very similar with Downes’ ideas: he sees an evolution from kinship-based clans and tribes (the extended family), over hierarchical institutions (army, state, church) to a market-driven society (banks, trading) to societies where networks are dominant (activist groups, civil society, one could add open source movement etc).
Of course, those four different organizational structures (Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks or TIMN) can co-exist. One can predict that those who benefit from an organizational structure will try to preserve their position by either trying to stop the evolution to models where their position gets weaker, or by working together with other groups so as to preserve their position in a new context.
More concrete now, what does this mean for outsourcing? Downes predicts outsourcing will become less the domain of industrialists, political leaders and rock stars, and will instead be more driven in a bottom up (networked) way. Projects like the peer-to-peer micro-financing network Kiva will become more typical than call centers. There will be greater need to build network capacity than to attract influential partners.
Trying to conclude, for now
In my opinion, virtual worlds, and especially virtual environments which are using open source technology and which celebrate user-generated content, can be very important in that struggle between the traditional corporate structures and the bottom up kind of alliances which are more typical for a networked society.
In fact, as individuals we outsource a lot of our activities in networked contexts: we share pictures on Flickr, we use gmail and I hope we’ll soon be able to use the Google Wave platform, we can use Amazon web services to launch very scalable sites… This is not a struggle against companies as such. Amazon, Google and Flickr/Yahoo! are of course all companies, but they function in ways which take into account the logic of networks, and by doing so they help individuals and lesser-known companies and projects to develop themselves. The struggle is one of mindsets: a mindset of hierarchy, control and uniformity versus one of autonomy, openness and diversity. It should surprise nobody that traditional companies struggle to get what virtual worlds and social media in general are about, while those environments are a fascinating part of the eco-system of the emerging networked economy and society.
Roland Legrand