A Cambrian Explosion of New Organizational Forms

That's the take-away from this interesting blog post at Org Theory by Jerry Davis (who teaches in the sociology program and business school at the University of Michigan).

The important paragraph:

If I’m right about the end of the “society of organizations,” or at least the end of the dominance of 20th-century-style encompassing corporations, then we may be on the verge of a Cambrian explosion of new organizational forms. This time, however, we may be able to escape the utter dominance of shareholder value. It’s happened before — consider the explosion of cooperative forms created in response to the first wave of corporatization, documented by the estimable Marc Schneiberg. We still have a surprising number of such non-corporate forms around, even in the US: State Farm Insurance (a mutual), Land ‘o Lakes (a producer cooperative), REI (a consumer cooperative) and the 8000 non-profit credit unions that enroll an amazing 86 million Americans. (It turns out the US is already socialist, but doesn’t know it.) And how about Wikipedia, Linux, and the various social movements that generate spontaneous collective action in the absence of a profit motive (e.g., Iran’s “Twitter revolution”)?"

This all seems overblown to me, but his consideration of org forms is interesting and something we should consider. Even if Jerry is right (and he's both smarter and better educated than I am), then I think the organizational form that dominated the 20th century (the corporation) still has lots of gas left. And, even more pointedly, the logic that lies behind the organization itself will still hold