Relevant resources; Future of Work

Which articles, reports, blogposts, and other online resources have relevancy with Peers Interaction Framework? Because of the analogies with a multitude of different domains (organisation, search & find, innovation, distributed networks, semantics, etc.), there are numerous relevant resources. This blogpost links to several important and interesting resources that concern (recent and less contemporary) theories on organization and economy.

Is the Nature of the Firm changing?
In Coase's "The Nature of the Firm" he explains how transactions and productive activities are ordered usually following either price signals (market) or directions in a firm. There has been significant attention the past two decades to another, third mode of economic production, one that is not directed by price or bosses, but is based on freedom and interaction in communities. Benkler explains that this new mode of production can be economically viable, and not a temporary anarchistic outburst of tech-savvy hippies in his paper called "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm".

In 1997 Thomas Malone and Robert Laubacher (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) wrote an article describing "Flexible Work Arrangements and 21st Century Worker's Guilds". This was just before they coined the name e-lance economy, to describe an economy with electronically connected freelancers -- e-lancers -- who join together into fluid and temporary networks to produce and sell goods and services. When the job is done -- after a day, a month, a year -- the network would dissolve and its members would again become independent agents. This is also the future MCC has in mind in the development of PEERS. It should be noted that these networks can emerge and dissolve both in the open, as in existing organizations. If organizations can in fact be highly dynamic, meaning that they are able to form these fluid networks quickly and easily, then these organizations will be more innovative and more flexible. Alex Slawsby explains in short how the e-lance economy actually works from the perspective of Coase theory on "The Nature of the Firm".

"In the New Economy, growth depends primarily on efficient flows of information between people. This means that the way people deal with each other has a far greater impact on business success than technology or collective agreements. As a result, the old functionally and hierarchically structured organisations are being replaced by networks of much smaller units with greater autonomy." This is one of the statements in a very interesting article about how the (future) economy and organizations behave, by Ulrich Klotz.