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Critique and Conclusions

8 September, 2015 - 15:32

The range of possible opportunities for new organizational forms includes both those devised around the business models of Dell, Nike, and Wal-Mart amongst others, and the open source and Wiki approaches. The criticisms of Wal-Mart’s approach have already been hinted at, and in recent years the ability of these approaches to continue to deliver benefits, returns and profits in a consistent and reliable manner has been brought into question. Only recently Dell has gone through a dip in performance and a crisis in its organizational structure and business model. Similarly Wal-Mart has begun to change its model of operations and focus less on cost-savings and more on customers.

On the other hand the bazaar model is also open to criticism and re-evaluation. Raymond himself makes a key point about the bazaar model: ‘one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style’. In other words, for the bazaar-model to work something, perhaps more cathedral-like, must already be in existence. This can be illustrated with regard to the development of Wikipedia and Wikis in general. They could only develop once the internet was a reliable and accessible reality. Moreover in the years since they first emerged the Wiki model has undergone various developments which take it away from total reliance and commitment to a bazaar of multiple babbling agendas. There is now a form of hierarchy within the Wikipedia community, effectively a horizontal and vertical division of labour, although it is far less formal and more fluid. Similarly developing features may be found within the open source community.

So it is important to note that these new ‘opportunities’ require careful thought and reflection. This is not to imply that the command-and-control model is immune from precisely the same criticisms. On the contrary, developments such as outsourcing and open source ventures demonstrate that there are good grounds to challenge the general arguments that justify the need for command-and-control management. Raymond goes even further in stressing that the overheads required for these forms of management cannot be justified; they do not even deliver what they are meant to do.

In the discussion of office automation it was noted that technological advances often result in undermining what was previously assumed to be the only way of doing something; opening out other possibilities or opportunities: So too with the development of ICT in general and the internet in particular with regard to organizations and management. The context now is that there needs to be recognition that the functions identified by Fayol, and the roles described by Mintzberg and other management and organizational theorists, all need to be re-evaluated in this new context. Some indication of this has already been given with regard to Fayol’s functions.

The opportunities for new organizational forms made possible by ICT provide a basis for innovation and also for reevaluation of traditional and accepted ideas about organization and management. Raymond, despite arguing in some places against the application of the open source, bazaar-like model to contexts other than software development, clearly sees the open source experience as offering a glimpse of a new way of organizing. He ends his classic paper with a quote from the 19th century Russian anarchist Pyotr Alexeyvich Kropotkin:

Having been brought up in a serf-owner’s family, I entered active life, like all young men of my time, with agreat deal of confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing and the like. Butwhen, at an early stage, I had to manage serious enterprises and to deal with [free] men, and when eachmistake would lead at once to heavy consequences, I began to appreciate the difference between acting onthe principle of command and discipline and acting on the principle of common understanding. The formerworks admirably in a military parade, but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned, and the aim canbe achieved only through the severe effort of many converging wills.

What ICT offers are various ways in which command-and-control models might be realized on a global scale, but also a host of possible alternatives and opportunities.