“Decentralized systems, on the other hand, are a little trickier to understand. In a decentralized organization, there’s no clear leader, no hierarchy, and no headquarters. If and when a leader does emerge, that person has little power over the others. The best that person can do to influence people is to lead by example. Nevins calls this an open system, because everyone is entitled to make his or her own decisions. This doesn’t mean that a decentralized system is the same as anarchy. There are rules and norms, but these aren’t enforced by any one person. Rather, the power is distributed among all the people and across geographic regions” (pp. 19-20)

i’m delighted to see that you’ve treated my timn work well. yes, i had spotted your postings about it. that’s partly why i decided to include your name on my latest send-around: the cyboc paper.

your email raises a lot of theoretical points, more than i can handle right now. maybe later, because this is all very interesting, and we are seeking in rather similar directions.

but i do have one comment that i can offer quickly enough. it’s about fiske’s framework. there is some overlap with timn, but not exactly. i briefly explain this in a 2006 study you may not have seen yet that focuses on the tribal (t) form, but also contains material on the other timn forms (see url below).

my take on fiske is different from your own. you equate the tribal form with equality-matching, but i equate it to his communal-sharing form. you think his communal-sharing form matches p2p nicely. in my view, none of his forms match the network form the way i’d like. here’s what i say there:

“One psychologist (Fiske, 1993) posits that all social relationships reduce to four forms of interaction: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. People develop their capacities for social interaction in that order, from infancy through early childhood. The sharing, ranking, and pricing forms correspond to the tribal, hierarchical, and market forms, respectively. The equality-matching form, which is mainly about equal-status peer-group behavior, does not correspond to any single form; it has some attributes that fit under network form, but other attributes (e.g., reciprocity, feuding, revenge) fit better under the tribal form.”

the url for this (including for .pdf download) is: http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR433/ (Social Forms, 2006)

a deeper issue here is whether the tribal and the network forms are all that different. i think they are. and i’d like them to be so. i write several pages about this. but as i note, if it turns out that the new network form is an upgraded version of the old tribal form, then the timn framework should be converted into a three-form framework, and what will come next later in spiral fashion is an upgraded version of the hierarchical form. hmm