Shaping Network Society

John Maynard Keynes once famously quipped that “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”There are four authors of the 20th Century that have become background knowledge shared across most global cultures that are keeping us from fully seeing the opportunities of [...]

Martin Reeves and his team at the Boston Consulting Group Strategy Institute have been working hard to regain BCG’s position as the world’s foremost strategic thinkers. A tough nut to crack in a time of uncertainty (world economic crisis) and a time of radical transformation (moving from contract to network society). If strategy is about [...]

I just spent the day at the Futures of Modernity Symposium in Munich, held in honor of Ulrich Beck, the grand sociologist and author of Risk Society (1992). The idea of the event was: Throughout the world, contemporary societies are facing the challenges posed by a set of heterogeneous phenomena of social change which are [...]

Whenever I have talked to government officials in 2009 (in Cancun, Erfurt, Vienna, Salzburg, or Washington DC), at some point in the conversation they mention that “we need to develop new modes of interacting with citizens.” Implicit in this argument is a frustration with the fairly artificial tool set they have at their disposal. Government [...]

In Western thought we locate the birth of rationalism with early Greek thinking, when mythical explanations of social artifacts do not suffice anymore. Rationalism can take two perspectives: (a) observatory or retrospective rationalism that seeks to describe and explain why things are happening by linking causes to effects and (b) instrumental rationalism that connects ends [...]

Political theory asks the question how do we create the good life? How good are historical and contemporary forms of governance and what can we do in order to improve governance for our contemporary and future societies? How do we understand membership (identity) and who should decide, what, when, where, and how (authority)? If we [...]

In the last days there has been a debate between Larry Lessig and Kevin Kelly about how to “name” the governance of network societies. Kevin Kelly proposed “new socialism” which Larry Lessig found irresponsible. Everyone and their grandmother (incl. me) chipped in with alternative names ranging from anarchy to participatory democracy. It might make sense [...]

Yesterday, Vivek Kundra launched several open government initiatives, most importantly the site Data.gov. It makes raw governmental data available in machine-readable format and allows users to build applications with the data. This type of governance by opening up (radical transparency as a management model) fully utilizes the power of web technologies and social media. It [...]

Mark Surman, the executive director of the Mozilla foundation gave a talk in Toronto last November titled “a city that thinks like the web.” His argument was that opennes and participation made the web better and can make cities better (just imagine how you can improve city services, if you have a million beta-testers). David [...]

[Challenge] In 2002 the world came together in Monterrey to address the millennium development goals. The goals were developed by governments for governments. Today, global problems and global interconnectedness are challenging us to reflect how we govern social life on all domains, not as governments but as human beings. The institutional ecology metaphor reminds us [...]