Tribal governance, the necessity of strategizing-as-practice

Abstract:

Usual ideal-types of hierarchy and markets divide the modes of organizing into islands of planning or seas of market trades. Networks were proposed as a different ideal-type in which relations are not quantifiable and trust makes them sticky. Those ideal-types do not seem to work well to explain online practices. Contrary to the economy of scarcity, the Web, peer-to-peer, open source, Wikipedia derive from the economy of plenitude and originated the ideal-type of the bazaar. The last decade brought cryptocurrencies to the global audience. The underneath architecture (blockchain) offers a novel mode of distributed authentication, which guarantees scarcity (infinite money is not money) and avoids central authorities. None of the previous ideal-types seems to work here, so millions of actors, from small traders to central banks, are by necessity strategizing-as-practice. This mode of organizing can be called ¿tribal¿ because it captures the paradox of rivalry originating ¿togetherness¿.

Notes:

Roundtable Participant