Tuesday, October 07, 2008

A new ecology of work

A couple of weeks ago, Not an MBA posted some thoughts about the new ecology of work and its repercussions. The conclusion:
My feeling is that it’s time to compare notes, to look at these missing pieces and others, and to make sure that they are addressed in ways that benefit and serve the workers. Forget about the tags “coworking”, “Jelly”, etc. for a moment, and consider the near future in which work and workplace is increasingly defined as a network of intentional local spaces, and as communities of working peers with something in common beyond the accidental fact they work for the same company.
Right. I suspect we'll see some really interesting changes in sectors whose organizational structures are beginning to resemble rhizomatic networks rather than hierarchies. (In fact, there's a book on this issue of networked organizations.) And there's a lot more thinking to be done about how mobile telecommunications and cheap digital tools are reconfiguring workspaces and consequently work organization.