On the Nature of Distributed Organizing (Markt- und Unternehmensentwicklung Markets and Organisations)

In a networked world which is characterized by interactive value creation, traditional organizational boundaries loose importance in favor of processes of distributed organizing. Therefore, thinking about and designing organizations requires going beyond designing hierarchical structures and processes ex-ante, but creating systems allowing for finding adaptive solutions ex-post. This book combines two perspectives: organizing and information technology. On the one hand, it offers deep theoretical insight into the processes of organizing for future organizations and distributed value creation of individuals. On the other hand, it offers applicable technical know-how for the design of information systems to support distributed organizing. Here, managers and organizations embracing complexity find profound understanding and suitable ways for implementing distributed organizing. Contents Concepts of Order Creation Information Systems for Distributed Organizing Themes of Interaction in Distributed Organizing Target Groups Faculty and students of business administration, organization, management, and business computer science Managers and Strategy Consultants Business Consultants and IT Consultants The Author Dominik Böhler is a research associate at the Department of Economics computer science, especially innovation and value creation at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg Foreword 6 Preface 8 Overview of Contents 9 Table of Contents 11 Table of Figures 15 List of Tables 17 Abbreviations 18 I Setting the Stage 19 1. The Dilemma of Distributed Organizing 20 2. Distributed Organizing in Practice 26 2.1. Politics 26 2.2. Research and Innovation 27 2.3. Product and Service Design 28 2.4. Work Organization 30 3. Framing Distributed Organizing Theoretically 31 4. Structure of the Thesis 34 II From Organizations to Distributed Organizing: Concepts of Order Creation 40 1. Overview 42 2. Order Creation from an Institutional Perspec-tive: Market, Bureaucracy, and Community 43 2.1 Market: Price and the Invisible Hand 44 2.2 Bureaucracy: Authority and Planning & Control 46 2.3 Community: Trust and Discourse 48 2.4 Distributed Organizing: Disassembling and Reassem-bling Market, Bureaucracy, and Community 50 3. Order Creation from a Systemic Perspective: Information Flows and Complexity 53 3.1. Institutional Forms and Information Flows 53 3.1.1. Institutional forms in the I-Space 53 3.1.2. Information flows in the I-Space 55 3.1.3. Social learning in the I-Space 56 3.2. Complexity and Distributed Organizing: From Environment to Co-evolving Ecosystem 58 3.2.1. Complexity: environments and ecosystems 58 3.2.2. Principles of complexity 60 3.3. Explaining Systemic Order Creation: Requisite Variety and Effective Complexity 62 3.3.1. Ashby’s law of requisite variety 62 3.3.2. The Ashby Space 63 3.3.3. Gell-Mann’s effective complexity: processing stimuli and re-sponses 65 3.4. Distributed Organizing: Coping with Complexity through Codification and Abstraction 67 4. Order Creation from a Transactional Perspective: Creating Practices from Sensemaking Processes 71 4.1. Decision-making vs. Sensemaking 71 4.2. Cognitive and Affective Elements of Sensemaking 74 4.2.1. Enactment 75 4.2.2. Selection 76 4.2.3. Retention 77 4.3. Practices: Enabling Embodied Sensemaking in Distributed Organizing 78 4.4. Distributed Organizing: Coping with External Complex-ity by Creating and Invoking Practices 81 5. Challenges in Distributed Organizing: Ambiguity, Bounded Rationality, and Computer-Mediation 82 5.1. Ambiguity: Balancing Complexity and Ambiguity Re-duction 82 5.2. Bounded Rationality: Mental Models and Human Infor-mation Processing 83 5.3. Computer-Mediation: ICT Enabled Communication 84 III Information Systems for Distributed Organizing 86 1. Overview 88 2. Institutional Paradigms: Systemic Order Creation in Information Systems 89 2.1. The Bureaucratic Paradigm: Achieving Systemic Order by Modeling Structures and Processes 92 2.2. The Market Paradigm: Achieving Systemic Order by Incentivizing Allocation of Products and Services 96 2.3. The Community Paradigm: Achieving Systemic Order by Hyperlinking Discourse 98 2.4. Distributed Organizing Support: Complex Adaptive Information Systems and the Differentiation of User and Designer 102 3. Ontologies and Cognitive Maps: Transactional Order Creation through Disambiguating Cognition 104 3.1. External Representation of Conceptualizations: Cogni-tive Maps and Ontologies 104 3.1.1. Cognitive maps and mental models 104 3.1.2. Ontologies: extensible, shareable, and flexible data structures 106 3.2. Ontology Creating Methods: Degree of Emergence vs. Number of Agents 109 3.2.1. Ontology engineering235 111 3.2.2. Collaborative ontology engineering 112 3.2.3. Ontology learning 113 3.2.4. Folksontologies 114 3.3. Meaning Creation in Cognitive Maps and Ontologies 116 3.3.1. The nature of meaning in cognitive maps and ontologies 116 3.3.2. Constructing meaning in cognitive maps and ontologies 117 3.4. Distributed Organizing Support: Mitigating the Effects of the Semantic Gap and the Real-Virtual Divide 118 4. Facilitating Order Creation in Distributed Orga-nizing: Triggering Practices to Answer External Complexity 120 4.1. Coping with Complexity through Codification: Semantic Information Systems 120 4.2. Coping with Complexity through Abstraction: Recommender Systems and Automated Facilitation 123 4.3. Distributed Organizing Support: Recommendation and Facilitation through Ontology-based Cognitive maps 125 5. Ontology-based Distributed Organizing: Answering the Challenges of Distributed Organizing 128 5.1. Ontology-based Distributed Organizing: Supporting the Search for Adaptive Responses to Complexity in Sensemaking Processes 131 5.2. Emergent Ontologies: Creating and Structuring Ontology-based Cognitive Maps 132 5.3. Adaptive Filters: Recommending Similar and Dissimilar Cognitive Maps 134 5.4. Facilitated Interaction: Supporting Sensemaking Pro-cesses in Distributed Organizing 135 IV Empirical Study: Themes of Interaction in Distributed Organizing 137 1. Overview 139 2. Method and Data: Research Question, Field of Research, Data Collection & Analysis 140 2.1. Research Question 140 2.2. Field of Research: A German Research Network 141 2.3. Data Collection and Data Analysis 143 2.3.1. Data collection 143 2.3.2. Data analysis 145 2.3.3. Validity of results 146 3. Findings: Themes of Interaction in a Network of Researchers 148 3.1. Themes of Interaction and their Variants 148 3.1.1. Group formation 149 3.1.2. Participation 151 3.1.3. Collaboration 152 3.1.4. Resolving heterogeneity 154 3.1.5. Leading role 156 3.1.6. Content production 157 3.2. Interrelating Themes of Interaction 159 4. Discussion: Creating Transactional Order using Levers of Ambiguity in Sensemaking Processes 162 4.1. Answering Complexity through Themes of Interaction 162 4.2. Form and Content as Levers of Ambiguity 164 4.3. Increasing and Decreasing Ambiguity in Distributed Organizing 165 5. Creating Systemic Order: Deriving Challenges for Information Systems Design 168 5.1. Planning vs. Enacting: Codifying Configurations of Le-vers of Ambiguity in the Enactment Phase 170 5.2. Opposing vs. Concurring Narratives: Refining Configu-rations of Levers of Ambiguity in the Selection Phase 170 5.3. Conservative vs. Progressive Narratives: Saving and Sharing Configurations of Levers of Ambiguity in the Retention Phase 172 V Ensembler Suite: A Support System for Ontology-based Distributed Organizing 174 1. Overview 176 2. From Organizing a Network of Researchers to a Support System for Ontology-based Distributed Organizing 177 2.1. Design Science: Creating Theories and Artifacts in In-formation Systems Research 177 2.2. An Initial Idea of Distributed Organizing Support for a Network of Researchers 180 2.2.1. Early stage design: initial prototype, design change, and launch 181 2.2.2. Profile building: personal front page and user profiles 181 2.2.3. Networking & information retrieval: projects, focus groups, and locations of the network 183 2.2.4. Knowledge exchange I: publications and wiki 184 2.2.5. Knowledge exchange II: extended wiki functionality 185 2.2.6. Successor support: redesigning for extensibility 186 2.2.7. Assessing limitations of concept and implementation 187 3. Requirements for a Technical Support System for Ontology-based Distributed Organizing 188 3.1. General Requirements 188 3.1.1. Cross-platform interoperability 188 3.1.2. Simple graph visualization 189 3.1.3 Realizing and coping with complexity 190 3.2. Specific Requirements 191 3.2.1. Enactment support: create and refine ontology-based cognitive maps 193 3.2.2. Selection support: compare ontology-based cognitive maps of groups and individuals 194 3.2.3. Retention support: create recommender systems to balance pro-gressive and conservative narratives 195 3.2.4. Resulting components of the support system 196 4. System Concept: A Support System for Collab-oratively Coping with Complexity 198 4.1. The Ensembler Suite: Enacter, Selecter, and Retainer 199 4.1.1. Enacter 200 4.1.2. Selecter 202 4.1.3. Retainer 203 4.2. System Architecture and Technical Components 204 5. System Implementation: A Proof-of-Concept Implementation of the Ensembler Suite 206 5.1. Proof-of-Concept Implementation of Enacter 207 5.2. Proof-of-Concept Implementation of Selecter 211 5.3. Proof-of-Concept Implementation of the Retainer 212 5.4. Evaluation of System Conceptualization and Proof-of-Concept Implementation 214 VI Discussion and Conclusion 217 1. Overview 219 2. Final Summary and Contributions of the Dis-sertation 220 3. Reflection: Pattern Prototypes in Different Sce-narios 225 3.1. Scenarios for Applying Ontology-based Distributed Organizing and the Ensembler Suite 225 3.2. Results from Applying Ontology-based Distributed Or-ganizing: Pattern Prototypes for Distributed Organizing 227 4. Managerial Implications 229 4.1. Structuring Interaction in Distributed Organizing 229 4.2. The Role of the Manager in Distributed Organizing 231 5. Limitations & Directions for Future Research 233 5.1. Limitations 233 5.2. Directions for Future Research in Organization Science 234 5.3. Directions for Future Research in Information Systems 237 References 239 Front Matter....Pages I-XVIII Front Matter....Pages 1-1 The Dilemma of Distributed Organizing....Pages 3-8 Distributed Organizing in Practice....Pages 9-13 Framing Distributed Organizing Theoretically....Pages 15-17 Structure of the Thesis....Pages 19-24 Front Matter....Pages 25-27 Order Creation from an Institutional Perspective: Market, Bureaucracy, and Community....Pages 29-38 Order Creation from a Systemic Perspective: Information Flows and Complexity....Pages 39-56 Order Creation from a Transactional Perspective: Creating Practices from Sensemaking Processes....Pages 57-67 Challenges in Distributed Organizing: Ambiguity, Bounded Rationality, and Computer-Mediation....Pages 69-72 Front Matter....Pages 73-75 Institutional Paradigms: Systemic Order Creation in Information Systems....Pages 77-91 Ontologies and Cognitive Maps: Transactional Order Creation through Disambiguating Cognition....Pages 93-108 Facilitating Order Creation in Distributed Organizing: Triggering Practices to Answer External Complexity....Pages 109-116 Ontology-based Distributed Organizing: Answering the Challenges of Distributed Organizing....Pages 117-125 Front Matter....Pages 127-129 Method and Data: Research Question, Field of Research, Data Collection & Analysis....Pages 131-138 Findings: Themes of Interaction in a Network of Researchers....Pages 139-152 Discussion: Creating Transactional Order using Levers of Ambiguity in Sensemaking Processes....Pages 153-158 Creating Systemic Order: Deriving Challenges for Information Systems Design....Pages 159-164 Front Matter....Pages 165-167 From Organizing a Network of Researchers to a Support System for Ontology-based Distributed Organizing....Pages 169-179 Requirements for a Technical Support System for Ontology-based Distributed Organizing....Pages 181-190 System Concept: A Support System for Collaboratively Coping with Complexity....Pages 191-198 System Implementation: A Proof-of-Concept Implementation of the Ensembler Suite....Pages 199-209 Front Matter....Pages 211-213 Final Summary and Contributions of the Dissertation....Pages 215-219 Reflection: Pattern Prototypes in Different Scenarios....Pages 221-224 Managerial Implications....Pages 225-228 Limitations & Directions for Future Research....Pages 229-234 Back Matter....Pages 235-253 In a networked world which is characterized by interactive value creation, traditional organizational boundaries loose importance in favor of processes of distributed organizing. Therefore, thinking about and designing organizations requires going beyond designing hierarchical structures and processes ex-ante, but creating systems allowing for finding adaptive solutions ex-post. This book combines two perspectives: organizing and information technology. On the one hand, it offers deep theoretical insight into the processes of organizing for future organizations and distributed value creation of individuals. On the other hand, it offers applicable technical know-how for the design of information systems to support distributed organizing. Here, managers and organizations embracing complexity find profound understanding and suitable ways for implementing distributed organizing. Contents Concepts of Order Creation Information Systems for Distributed Organizing Themes of Interaction in Distributed Organizing Target Groups Faculty and students of business administration, organization, management, and business computer science Managers and Strategy Consultants Business Consultants and IT Consultants The Author Dominik Böhler is a research associate at the Department of Economics computer science, especially innovation and value creation at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg