Global Microstructures

Global Complex Microstructures = new framework replacing older institutional forms of coordinating human activities

Description

Brian Holmes, citing sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina, at http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Network-swarm-microstructure.html

""Modern, industrial society created ’complex’ forms of organizations that managed uncertainty and task fulfillment through interiorized systems of control and expertise. But complexity was institutional complexity ; it meant sophisticated multi-level mechanisms of coordination, authority and compensation that assured orderly functioning and performance. A global society leans towards a different form of complexity ; one emanating from more microstructural arrangements and the rise of mechanisms of coordination akin to those found in interaction systems.... The basic intuition that motivates the concept of a global microstructure is that genuinely global forms, by which I mean fields of practice that link up and stretch across all time zones (or have the potential to do so), need not imply further expansions of social institutional complexity. In fact, they may become feasible only if they avoid complex institutional structures. Global financial markets for example, where microstructures have been found, simply outrun the capacity of such structures. These markets are too fast, and change too quickly to be ’contained’ by institutional orders. Global systems based on microstructural principles do not exhibit institutional complexity but rather the asymmetries, unpredictabilities and playfulness of complex (and dispersed) interaction patterns ; a complexity that results, in John Urry ?s terms, from a situation where order is not the outcome of purified social processes and is always intertwined with chaos. More concretely, these systems manifest an observational and temporal dynamics that is fundamental to their connectivity, auto-affective principles of self-motivation, forms of ’outsourcing’, and principles of content that substitute for the principles and mechanisms of the modern, complex organization." (http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Network-swarm-microstructure.html)