Comments on: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy, by Richard N. Langlois https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-dynamics-of-industrial-capitalism-schumpeter-chandler-and-the-new-economy-by-richard-n-langlois/2006/08/15 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Sat, 09 Sep 2006 23:10:05 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 By: Michel Bauwens https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-dynamics-of-industrial-capitalism-schumpeter-chandler-and-the-new-economy-by-richard-n-langlois/2006/08/15/comment-page-1#comment-2820 Sat, 09 Sep 2006 23:10:05 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=371#comment-2820 Thanks for the comment, which I originally missed. You are entirely right that the collaborative dynamics will play out differently depending on the context. From my own experience, in the current corporate context, Tom Peters’ recommendations are great for a very dynamic minority, but devastating to the workforce overall, as the instability created by the advocated creative chaos is not balanced by any securisation of livelihoods.

]]> By: Kevin Carson https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-dynamics-of-industrial-capitalism-schumpeter-chandler-and-the-new-economy-by-richard-n-langlois/2006/08/15/comment-page-1#comment-1842 Tue, 15 Aug 2006 17:07:41 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=371#comment-1842 Thanks for the tip. I’ve downloaded it, and it’s on my to-read list for my research project on anarchist organizational behavior theory.

From your and Hagel’s description, the “vanishing hand” sounds an awful lot like the kind of stuff Tom Peters was cheerleading for in the ’90s.

For me, a more pointed question would be why the hierarchical corporation did *not* disintegrate to anywhere near the extent Peters predicted. Another issue is how such disintegration, to the extent it *does* take place, occurs in a corporate framework that leaves the separate outsourced functions within a mercantilist framework of branding, IP, and finance still controlled from the central corporate headquarters.

As I see it, Peters’ “revolutionary” rhetoric about tearing down corporate walls, self-directed teams, and the like, is a dialectic that can be developed in different ways depending on the system of power. In one way, reading Peters is a lot like reading Kropotkin’s Fields, Factories and Workshops a century ago: all sorts of potential seeds for decentralized, bottom-up economics. In the other, it’s stuff that can be incorporated into the framework of a centralized corporate economy for its own purposes, with the wonderful theories of “lean production” and “quality control circles” translating in practice into something like what Jane Slaughter and Mike Parker (Working Smart) called “management-by-stress.”

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