Bertrand Duperrin's Library tagged networkeconomy → View Popular, Search in Google

Nov

2011

Task-based work revisited

"Technology does not determine social and organizational change, but it does create new opportunity spaces for social innovations like new employment forms. Partial employment for young unemployed people is becoming much easier than before, and truly global task-based work is becoming possible, perhaps for the first time in history."

eskokilpi.blogging.fi/...task-based-work-revisited

- Preview

job work networkeconomy networkedconomy humancapital interdependance knowledgework tasks organization hierarchy

The opportunity today is in new relational forms that don’t mimic the governance models of industrial, hierarchical firms. We are already witnessing the rise of very large-scale efforts that create tremendous value in a very new way.
The production of information goods requires more human capital than financial capital. It is more about connecting with brains than connecting with money. And the good news is that you are not limited to the local supply. Work on information products does not need to be co-located. The architecture of work does not resemble a factory any more.
8 more annotation(s)...
- Our management and organizational thinking is derived from the era of tangible goods production and high-cost/low-quality communications.
- Almost all economic theories make the same assumption: the employer – employee relationship makes work possible.
- The other taken for granted assumption is that it is the independent employer/manager who exercises freedom of choice in choosing the goals and designing the rules that the members of the organization are to follow. The employees of the organization are not seen autonomous
- In contrast to the above, digital work has brought about circumstances in which the employee in effect chooses the purpose of work, voluntarily selects the tasks, determines the modes and timing of engagement, and designs the outcomes. The worker here might be said to be largely independent of some other person’s management, but is in effect interdependent
- The interdependent, task-based worker negotiates her work based on her own purposes, not the goals of somebody else, and chooses her fellow workers based on her network, not a given organization.
- The organization is not a given hierarchy, but an ongoing process of organizing.
- The factory logic of mass production forced people to come to where the work is. The crowdsourcing logic of mass communication makes it possible to distribute work to where the people are, no matter where on the globe they may be.
- Knowledge work is not about jobs or job roles but about tasks.