Imagine a future economy. An economy that is highly decentralized. An economy that dynamically adapts to the challenges it is confronted with. An economy in which you will not know anymore for whom you are working for besides of yourself. As your employment will only be virtual, the whole economy promises to be as well, consisting only of several interrelated networks competing and cooperating with each other at the same time. These networks might form hierarchies and markets only on demand resolving them afterwards again and thereby permanently reinventing economy on the whole. (Hoellinger)

That would be ridiculous and impossible you might think now, but this scenario might exactly be where current ideas of some of the most prominent tailors of organizational fashion could lead to when being exaggerated. Paralyzed by the revolutionary developments that seem to happen right under their eyes, these binary prophets singing the hymn of praise for our digital future sometimes might lack a pleasant portion of critical reflection in their thoughts. Maybe we are actually experiencing some fundamental changes at the moment, irreversibly altering the countenance of society as we know it? Apparently, this development must have influences that impressive that it seems to be necessary to brand even incremental changes with own version numbers like “2.0″ for instance. However, perhaps we are just experiencing a renaissance of something that shines in new splendor and was possibly already there once?  So the question arises whether all these changes are part of a completely new, revolutionary development or if all this might be nothing else than the evolutional pendulousness of an organizational oscillation. The paradoxes of organization might make it even in fundamentally changing environments necessary for an organization to reintegrate the before differentiated and to oscillate in these contradictions.

The widely observable development towards a more networked and therefore more social economy might not be so new after all because doing businesses and creating wealth in networking structures could not be a revolution at all. Being especially true for economic history, the future sometimes might be like the past. Humans have always achieved extraordinary accomplishments in networks in history, sometimes even long before markets and organizations as we know them today came widespread into existence.

So what is so new about the networked economy after all besides of its technological achievements? Is it just increasing quantity of participants and speed that characterizes the current development or is it really a fundamental change in what is the core of society? Within the next weeks we will give you some thoughts on the questions starting with this disturbing introduction today.