Negotiated order and network form organizations

Abstract

Throughout the 20th century, the industrial age roots of hierarchical top‐down planning and command‐and‐control supervision have been the foundations for management thinking. At the beginning of the 21st century, many futurists and systems thinkers have widely declared that businesses must equip themselves to be more responsive to rapidly changing environments. Dynamic, knowledge‐based businesses require that rigid forms of business governance give way to networked forms. Since many successful businesses have shifted from autonomous independent enterprises to building alliances and inter‐organizational relationships, we advocate a renewed examination of negotiated order and a focus on the fluidity enabled by it. The traditional advantages of legal order are being outweighed by its inherent rigidity. Under conditions of rapid change, maintaining an internally consistent set of rules, essential to legal order, is inefficient and relatively ineffective. Systems of negotiated order are characterized by situational coordination of interests, flexible definitions of desired end states, and spontaneous initiatives by interested stakeholders. We examine the development of the Linux community and its negotiated system of self‐governance, and offer three additional business examples that suggest how negotiated order may provide a platform for stakeholders to innovatively leverage the dynamics of the contemporary environment. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The Conditions for Health and Social Care Policy: Routines and Institutions in the Dutch Case of Need Assessment

“…Use of the concept of negotiated order enables us to focus on these features and it helps us to recognize the virtual inevitability of negotiations. We can now understand why the Dutch national government had less than perfect control over the way in which its creation worked in practice, and why, as Parhankangas et al (2005) would put it, the Dutch government ' s new set of rules, essential to legal order but inherently rigid, was relatively ineffective given its purpose, which was to change routines. We do not suggest that in reality a negotiated order should replace legal order, even though they are often considered natural enemies.…”

“…Such orders develop, change and vanish (Strauss et al 1963; Strauss 1982). Typical of a negotiated order are the flexible definitions of desired end states, a situational coordination of interests and spontaneous initiatives by interested agents (Parhankangas et al 2005). This is also typical for ‘multi‐level governance systems’ (Hooghe and Marks 2003) of a type in which jurisdictions operate at different levels and where citizens are served by a variety of different public services, including health care and welfare agencies.…”

Design Flaws and Service System Breakdowns: Learning from Systems Thinking

“…yes, sorry that things didn't work out this time, we can make it up the next time). Commonly, when contracts fail, recourse is not exercised and parties work out problems through negotiated order (Macaulay, 1963;Parhankangas, Ing, Hawk, Dane, & Kosits, 2005).  One party could have the perspective that an offering is an output (e.g.…”

Systems theory: a worldview and/or a methodology aimed at requisite holism/realism of humans' thinking, decisions and action

“…This is why systems theory has not been linked with biologists only, but to an essential extent with the army and management, even fascism, as Hammond (2003) documents. Thought, a centralistic hierarchy of subordination, does not provide systems thinking leading to holism, but networking and co-operation, especially the interdisciplinary one, does (Ž enko, 1999;Rosi, 2004;Udovičič, 2004;Parharkangas et al, 2005;Treven and Mulej, 2005;Malcolm and Chroust, 2006;Rosi and Mulej, 2006).…”