Sorry, the Network Society has Already been Invented: Why Management Education Needs Indigenous Input

Abstract

Networks are a good site for exploring this paradox. The ‘digital revolution’ and the ‘network society’ are trumpeted as the new basis for globalisation, a combination of technology and management practices that justifies global capitalism in its claimed right to lead the world. Yet Management and Organisation Studies (MOS) was dominant many decades before digital technology arrived, before networks were celebrated. Was this earlier form of management defective? Conversely, Indigenous societies lacked digital technologies but had highly developed forms of network organisation. Were they organisationally superior in some respects to the dominant western forms of organisation? Is it possible that western forms have still not caught up? Should modern organisations and management educators seek to learn from groups and practices that have hitherto been marginalised and despised?