Did you ever walk into a room and disturb a couple en flagrante, as Del Boy might say? Well, that's how I felt when I saw Will Davies and James Crabtree (both of iSociety) discussing a paper about the tyranny of structurelessness that Will found. By the time I realised their neighbours were also involved, I was blushing, coughing into my hand and making my excuses. Is think-tank some kind of onomatapoeic euphemism? I think so judging from the homoeroticism of day one and the Freudian slip in Will's account of day two.

Anyway, the tyranny of structurelessness argues that apparently flat or non-hierarchical organisational (power) structures are not inherently democratic or inclusive; or, as Will puts it:

"In essence: stripping away formal and explicit rules from groups does not result in groups without power relations or hierachies. All it does is replace them with implicit, invisible and tacit forms of power relations - friendship networks, charisma, chat and all the other things which Californian Nietzscheans rather like."

Will also relates this to Richard Sennett's idea that �Power is present in the superficial scenes of teamwork, but authority is absent�.

Ding-dong. Comments fly between Demos, who don't really seem to disagree with the article in qustion, and iSociety. Others join in, including a Bill Thompson-bot that says they are both wrong, naturally, and he'll tell us the answer later. From a private party in iSociety's bedroom, this has turned into a very interesting debate about something that cuts to the heart of much of our current thinking about the way in which internetworking and the new economy and policy will operate.

Will clarifies one of his main points thus:

"the veneer of organisational flatness hides the peaks and troughs of personality dynamics. Max Weber was very well aware of this fact: there is an alternative to "rational decision-making", and it emerges from the (irrational) cult of personality. Was it really a coincidence that the cult of the CEO coincided with a flattening of US corporations over the course of the 90s? No. After bureaucracy becomes a dirty word, people seek to fill the void with 'talent', 'charisma' and other mystical, non-rational entities which, incidentally, lead to widening wage inequalities once they manifest themselves as winner-take-all markets or a 'war for talent'."

Within many organisations, this idea will strike a chord. There are a lot of people suffering great anxiety and disempowerment because they are the victims of such apparently non-hierarchical organisational structures. It is clear who has power and who does not, but power is wielded without clear responsibility and a recognition of the boundaries between roles. Instructions are just "suggestions", but God help you if you don't interpret these suggestions in the right way. Working in internet companies, for example, workers are often more likely to complain about the lack of structure, the lack of clear lines of authority and nambiguous instructions than about there being too much hierarchy. Whilst social network analysis and complexity theory have an important role to play in helping us understand organisations and networks, that does not mean that we should seek to remove all pre-existing, sometimes traditional ways of organising collective effort in favour of flat, unregulated networks.

I think we sometimes forget just how culturally specific this phenomenon is. When US-based proponents of
online social networking say that "The Network is the Market ... Social Networks (unlike Political or Creative Networks) are fundamentally transactional," they are correctly describing their own beahviour, but not perhaps that witnessed in many societies that retain some forms of traditional structure (arguably even the UK). Even within business, many people do not *just* apply a form of subconcious transaction analysis in managing their networks - I might do business with somebody because I like them, or I want to help them, or perhaps because my principles dictate that I support their work.

There is perhaps no such thing as structurelessness in human relations, and especially within a business context. The charismatic CEO role in an apparently flat organisational structure is, in a sense, analagous to the role on the United States in an increasingly unregulated international system. Whilst instinctively, like Demos, many of us would favour non-hierarchical organsiational forms, the paper mentioned above and Will Davies' analysis, remind us that this is not always the best solution for those who are not the charming CEO or the United States - the ability to enjoy the benefits of open markets and free socieities is also a function of our position in the power structures at play, whether we like it or not.