Networks and Commons: Bureaucracy, Collegiality and Organizational Morphogenesis in the Struggles to Shape Collective Responsibility in New Sharing Institutions

Abstract

The current context for human flourishing is bleak: global warming and major extinctions caused by human action, triggering mass migrations, complex wars and the spread of global destructive capacity. Triumphant and ruthless capitalism armed with large bureaucracies (i.e. control, rationalization, technocracy and efficiency in mass and routine production), deregulated markets and a productivist growth mystique has led to predatory exploitation of the environment, to concentration of powers and to extreme levels of inequality in all domains. For example, the institutional framework of contemporary capitalist economies has been strongly influenced by liberalization policies initiated in the late 1970s: financialization of the economy, privatization of public services and withdrawal of the state, development of widespread, multilevel anormative regulation (Archer 2016). The prospect of being short of time for the transition to different kinds of societies, if not of big calamities and/or self-destruction by humanity going about its business as usual, is no longer fiction