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An interim summary

8 September, 2015 - 15:32

So as we move towards the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century we are all bound up with a movement that has, amongst other effects, resulted in a dismantling of the ways in which organizations need to operate. They no longer need to be situated in a single location, their routine operations can be tightly linked to other organizations, and aspects of their routine existence such as division of labour and management are open to several possible alternative forms.  

In manufacture this can be most widely understood as an increasing number of manufacturing processes are dismantled and spread across the globe in what is one of the primary and most visible forms of ‘globalization’. The global economy is a complex concept, but one of its key characteristics is the way in which a finished product available for sale in a shop in, for example, the USA or Western Europe has passed through a series of stages of manufacture and packing that may have taken in factories and warehouses in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe.

At an abstract level these sorts of developments have been widely discussed and investigated under such headings as ‘the virtual organization’ and ‘computer supported cooperative work’ [CSCW] – both terms originating in the 1980s. In the commercial domain virtual organizations and CSCW have taken on the form of ‘out-sourcing’ or ‘offshoring’ both or goods and services. Some people have welcomed these developments on the grounds that they offer employment and development opportunities (both individually and more generally) to areas that previously have been deprived and under-developed. Others criticize such moves as simply perpetuating dependency and underdevelopment, since these strategies are all-too-often driven by the aim of cutting costs and so involve child labour, very low wages, and poor and dangerous working conditions. A further criticism from developed countries is that such practices move jobs away from developed economies, and so deprive employment opportunities to lowerskilled people in those countries.

Virtual organizations and CSCW have also had an impact in the non-commercial sectors – affecting NGOs, civil society organizations [CSOs], community organizing and many other forms of collective activity. These issues will be discussed further in the later sections of this chapter. For the moment it needs to be understood that all the developments discussed so far lead to the necessity to rethink the ‘value chain’, the role of management, organizational forms, the division of labour, the nature of competition and cooperation.