Beyond Business: The Rise of Digital Sociology
Posted on December 5, 2008
Filed Under What's New |
Martin Parker wrote a great article in last week’s Observer “If Only Business Schools Wouldn’t Teach Business”. Martin is professor of organisation and culture at Leicester University’s School of Management.
The general drift was the education system relies heavily for cash on the business schools but all the business schools are teaching is business…. something wrong there?
Martin’s point is we need to understand all types of organisation. “Management” as a term has very specific meanings - born in the Fordist past its disciplines are not necessarily relevant to a digital world where people display multiple levels of loyalty to different tribes.
In fact you could argue that not even modern sociology can capture the extraordinary eruption of loyalties that social networks bring - we need a new digital anthropology, sociology or call it what you will.
That’s a point we are making implicitly and sometimes explicilty at The Conversation Group, that the business our clients are in is not simply affected by currents such as user generated content, but has become about the new dynamics of communications, and the redefinition of every company’s role in the way people want to conduct those relationships. That in turn implies understanding the impact of how people’s loyalties form, shift and reform and to what ends.
These patterns are being driven by social networking but what in turn is driving social networking? To a certain extent it is a liberating dynamic and you can see in the way young people use networks they are a social tool.
There are many of us too who use them to find business alliances. But I think what’s driving them is the greater level of education, and a new sense of civil rights (it is our right to be creative) that work denies us. Once people begin to exercise that right much else happens - the dynamic of mass micro-communications is that people can’t hide the truth or hide from it, not for very long.
For example, I know from people I have interviewed that companies in the UK are losing staff because they continue to greenwash their environmental policies.
The fact that staff are forcing management to act ethically on the environment, to act on their CSR statements, says a lot about management ethics - or the weaknesses in ethical systems that have to change. Let me put that another way - currently our system of organising work creates systemic ethical weaknesses that an educated workforce, free to communicate globally, is not tolerating as it used to.
Apart from that I believe a hidden dynamic is the near bankruptcy of the public sector in the West. Yes, we see Gordon Brown spending freely now in the UK and Paulson in the USA, Sarkozy in France etc. But it is telling that the Iraq war is ravaging UK and US finances in a way previous wars did not.
Pensions reliant on stock markets are now a crisis of tragic proportions for many people. Hospital systems can no longer cope with a society where cure is the dominant ethos of well being. And social services are left with multiple generations of families who are bearing children in their early teens.
Balancing public finances is a secondary issue. Altering how we envision the organisation of work and society is the primary one. I beleive that is rising to the top of many of those agendas out there.
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