Business Policy
Perspectives on Managerial Responsibility
[Based on: Dash, D. P. (2000). "Creating Pools of Management Capacity to Meet Emerging Professional Challenges: Role of Collaborative Technologies", In the Proceedings of the Association of Indian Management Schools: The New Millennium (Twelfth) Convention on Management Paradigms for the E-Millennium, Aug 27-29, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. pp. 135-145.]
The emerging socio-economic order seems to be posing many new challenges before management today. It is argued that these challenges have to be met within the context of multiple diversities confronting management thinking and practice. The paper argues that the management profession needs to find a suitable way to manage the diversities so as to extend its repertoire of skills and methods in dealing with the challenges being posed by the emerging socio-economic order. The paper outlines a possible approach for competence building within the profession, called the self-organisation approach. The approach involves the spontaneous construction of a resource (e.g., system, network, process, environment, etc.) that serves as the basis of a unique competence for managers in a particular situation.
The paper identifies a critical domain for innovations in management. It is the domain of designing appropriate forms of interaction among actors, skills, knowledge bases, etc., such that the chances of new resources being created collectively is increased. It is important to specify the appropriate rules of interaction and co-ordination that make it more likely for new collective resources to emerge. The role of the so-called collaborative technologies in visualising and implementing such rules has been discussed in the paper.
1. A Brief Background of Management
Management roles must have existed simultaneously with organised collective work in every society. As an organised profession however, management truly emerged in 1948, with the establishment of the Operational Research Club in the UK that later became the Operational Research Society (see http://www.orsoc.org.uk/ors/intro.htm). Although since 1938 the term operational research (OR) referred to a particular set of activities in the British military establishments, the OR Society succeeded in giving it a more general meaning subsequently. OR became the practice of providing the necessary rational analysis in order to improve the quality of decision making in any managed enterprise. In this general sense, the term became synonymous with management science as it also encompassed the use of all the tools and techniques of book-keeping, activity scheduling, job enrichment, and productivity improvement, which have been consistently introduced decades, even centuries, before. Worth-mentioning here are the double entry system of book-keeping developed by the Italian mathematician and friar Luca Pacioli in 1494, Charles Babbage’s work on industrial productivity in the UK during the 1830s, the scientific management approach of Frederick Taylor in the United States of America (USA) since 1885, and the techniques of time and motion study—especially the work carried out for the cotton textile industry in the UK by the Shirley Research Institute from 1920 onwards (Duckworth, 1962, p.12; Drucker, 1990, p. 222; Keys, 1991; Kirby and Capey, 1998; see http://www.acaus.org/acc_his.html for the history of accounting).
Since the end of World War II management has been seen as relevant to every human effort that brings together people of diverse knowledge and skills working in one collective project. It is seen as applicable to business organisations, hospitals, churches, universities, social service agencies, political organisations, etc. Traditional disciplines such as economics, psychology, sociology, and mathematics have contributed to management as well as the relatively newer specialisations such as decision science, organisation studies, information science, systems science, praxiology, cybernetics, etc.
Today management encompasses a vast scope. It is concerned with preparing, organising, and executing human efforts so as to make the best utilisation of the available resources and achieving some specified organisational objectives. It also involves devising organisational systems to facilitate collaboration among a diverse set of individuals, restructuring the existing organisations so as to make them more responsive, initiating new forms of interaction (among all stakeholders of the organisation) that reduce co-ordination costs and create value for all participants, etc. Besides, there are the issues of skill upgrading, process innovation, organisational renewal, risk management, selection and recruitment, design of virtual workplaces, relationship with customers, group decision support, social responsibility of organisations, emerging global order guiding the evolution of technology, finance, and trade, etc.
Management knowledge is not only concerned with describing and explaining organisational phenomena (i.e., the so-called ‘because of’ knowledge) but also prescribing how some desired phenomena might be produced (i.e., the so-called ‘in order to’ knowledge).
If managers want goal-based “in order to” knowledge while academics produce empirical “because of” knowledge, then application of the latter will seldom provide managers with what they desire (Lundberg, et al., 1998, p.389).
The history of management shows that the subject has always faced a multitude of puzzles; new ones emerging even before the old ones could be adequately resolved: What motivates people to work? What affects the productivity of work? What promotes shared understanding? Which organisational structures promote or prohibit innovation? How to measure organisational effectiveness? How to direct organisational conflicts in a positive direction? How to tap the rich knowledge of the line functionaries? How to attract and retain individuals with appropriate skills? How to improve decision-making under uncertain circumstances? How to set long-term objectives? How to achieve sustainable superior performance? The puzzles seem to have grown in number, scope, and complexity over the years.
The traditional notion of management is captured well in the formulation of Henri Fayol (1841-1925). Fayol suggested that a set of functions, each incorporating a subset of principles could be used to describe the management process. Fayol was the original proponent of this functional approach. He drew upon the work of the famous sociologist Max Weber who had presented an organisational model known as rational bureaucracy. Fayol suggested five major functions of management: (i) Planning, (ii) Organising, (iii) Co-ordinating, (iv) Controlling, and (v) Commanding: (POCCC or POC3). Luther Halsey Gulick followed soon thereafter with a set of functions described by the acronym POSDCORB (Planning, Organising, Staffing, Directing, Co-ordinating, Reporting, and Budgeting).
The contemporary perspective focuses attention on the inherent difficulties and tensions in the traditional perspective on the nature of managerial task and on the nature of management knowledge. The traditional view presents the manager as a powerful manipulator of physical and other resources, people, and their interactions, wielding control over complex psychological, economic, technological, and political processes. Such a manager is traditionally seen as one who can be equipped with objective knowledge about people, groups, organisation, markets, and various other wider processes that might affect the performance of an organisation.
The emerging view, however, highlights the immensity of the challenge of achieving the targets the traditiional view sets for strategic managers. It indicates that organisations' futures are produced through a complex interaction and, as such, are difficult to predict. The everchanging demands on an organisation require of it the ability to invent new structures, systems, and strategies, that cannot be tested for their effectiveness before they are implemented. The emerging view also expresses the challenge of maintaining a constructive interaction among all the organisational stakeholders without expecting them to be aligned in some common direction and without sharing some common values. According to this view, neither strategic managers nor management researchers have models of organisatons that can be used to control the organisation.The challenge is to recognise this difficulty and develop a new breed of models for organisational interactions that produce the kind of stability without becoming inflexible.
Such issues concerning the nature and scope of management, changing expectations from the profession, and the ever-growing number of puzzles are relevant in discussing the new competencies required within the profession.
2. Growing Pressures on Management
In certain circumstances management interventions might constitute a type of colonisation of others’ work environment and their life-worlds. Those who do not want to be intervened upon in this manner are increasingly resisting such colonisation in our times. A case in point is the privatisation of public sector units—PSUs (such as the state electricity boards and state-owned insurance corporations) in India. In circumstances like these, the management profession is expected to find solutions, which are acceptable to all significant stakeholders. This involves the task of consensus building, or at least accommodating the varied interests of multiple actors.
In many situations, the professional support of management comes in the form of a set of recommendations. However, management professionals are not the only ones producing such recommendations. There are other actors who produce them as well, e.g., politicians, spiritual leaders, public officials, family heads, etc. It is becoming difficult to argue that the management recommendations are superior to other recommendations. The difficulty is particularly serious when the underlying arguments and the supporting evidences used in management thinking are found to be restrictive in many ways. This gives rise to the requirement that the recommendations should be based on an effective collaboration among those who are willing to contribute to it, even if their contributions are not always compatible with each other.
With the proliferation of management ideas, there is a peculiar problem of reconciling among the growing number of ideas/frameworks being introduced in the field. The problem is exacerbated when the ideas assume the dimensions of fads and fashions (Jackson, 1995). Now popular management ideas/frameworks such as TQM (Total Quality Management) and BPR (Business Process Reengineering) can be cited to illustrate this problem. The profession stands challenged to apply these ideas in a self-conscious and critical manner. This requires an understanding of the background challenges that have given rise to these ideas. What is more significant, a practitioner should be able to interpret and learn from the experience of deploying these ideas.
No unique way has been found that would completely characterise the complex reality associated with the activity called management and the complex role of the management professional with respect to that reality. At one level, there is an external reality of material, money, or manufacturing that could be described objectively. Observations on these could be compared and patterns could be identified, for example, the degree of operational flexibility associated with alternative manufacturing systems or the relationship between financial risk and return. At another level, there is an internal reality of human thoughts, emotions, behaviour, and mental models. Various innovations have been tried to observe this internal reality, e.g., through participant observation, unobtrusive observation, etc. Some have relied on reports (including self-reports) instead of observations. However, there are doubts pertaining to the reliability of such reports. At yet another level, there is the intermediate reality of social and organisational structures that simultaneously shape and are shaped by human behaviour. The present state of the methodological debate in management appears to converge on the need for methodological pluralism, i.e., the need for allowing a healthy flourishing of multiple methodologies while also retaining the possibility of a constructive conversation among them (see, for example, Mingers and Gill, 1997).
All these pressures on management can be interpreted as originating from various forms of diversity: diversity of stakeholders’ interests, diversity of recommendations, diversity of ideas, and diversity of methodologies (Figure 1).
Figure 1. New demands on the management profession
3. Increasingly Difficult Tasks
Management is confronted with increasingly difficult tasks due to the ever-expanding scope of corporate organisations. In the sphere of industry and commerce, most nation states exercise control over investments within their own economies and over external capital transactions. This control is declining in most cases. A study corroborates that such control over investments and external capital transactions have both declined recently in the Asian economies (Patnaik, 1999). This control has passed on to private corporations, international investor groups, and especially the multinational and trans-national corporations. From the point of view of these corporations and groups, there is a steady increase in the autonomy with which they can access financial and other capital, invest it in economically productive avenues, or place it in some speculative channels. Concomitant with this increased autonomy is the additional risk of losing value because of the ups and downs of the business cycles, exchange rate fluctuations, political instability, etc. This signifies a huge challenge for managers. The challenge includes making much better forecasts of economic and political events (wherever possible), making better assessments of investment proposals (especially in economies where a corporation has little prior experience), improving upon the existing methods of risk management (e.g., innovating new financial instruments and derivatives), etc. The challenge also includes strengthening the capacity of the corporations for strategic management. It includes a broad canvass of skills/techniques exercised by senior managers to bring about a desirable future for their corporations by continuously reviewing the objectives to be pursued and revitalising their organisations from time to time to match their unique capabilities to an evolving environment.
The state also seems to be withdrawing from spheres of activity other than industry and commerce, e.g., from education at various levels, health care, social planning, communication, social security, management of natural resources including the environment, training its own personnel, designing, implementing, and evaluating its own programmes, etc. All these responsibilities are devolving upon private corporations, registered societies, co-operatives, etc. Whoever assumes such responsibilities now faces the unique challenge of delivering the required services without a political mandate. This implies that the service cannot be fully justified by appealing to some political purpose anymore, but by appealing to some other criteria, e.g., performance, service quality, capacity building, social advantages created, opportunities opened up, etc. This signifies a wholly new breed of challenges for the management profession. It includes defining long-term objectives for a variety of organisations and activities (e.g., education) that had derived their objectives from some political ideology in the past. It also includes identifying suitable performance indicators, developing planning and implementation methods that ensure some specified criteria of success, improving monitoring and evaluation methods so as to permit effective use of their results, developing methods of consensus building, and supporting groups of people trying to address complex and interdependent problems.
Corporations are expanding in terms of scale and scope. Let us consider scale first. Inherent in the logic of corporate existence is the requirement for higher returns. The returns are required to fuel the continuous search for better performance (e.g., through product development, training of employees, better advertising, etc.). It is also required to thwart competitors, escape declining markets, secure a greater bargaining power over suppliers and customers, explore new lines of business, and also build in an insurance against unforeseen future circumstances. Despite strong reminders that we live in a finite earth that cannot go on supporting growth indefinitely (e.g., Meadows, et al., 1974), growth continues to be high on the corporate agenda. In the process, some corporations have grown bigger than some countries (in terms of value of output). Some have argued that corporations are also superseding nation-states and emerging as the dominant governance institutions of our times (e.g., Korten, 1998, p.54). Such global corporations operate simultaneously in multiple societies while trying to maintain some corporate identity and a coherent set of business policies. This is posing a number of difficult challenges for management. The profession is now called upon to answer questions like these: How to improve the co-ordination of operations at a global scale? How to help such huge organisations adapt to local cultures and local exigencies without diluting the corporate image? How to maintain a sense of shared values across the entire corporation? How to structure the decision making process within such multi-local and complex organisations? How to integrate the individual employee’s experiences to the broader realm of corporate memory and corporate learning?
Corporations are also expanding in terms of scope. The idea of economies of scope is becoming entrenched in corporate practice today (Chandler, 1990). Economic pressures to reduce costs, financial pressure to reduce risks, and commercial pressures to provide more and more value to the customer are all instrumental here. Corporations are integrating backwards and forwards, diversifying into related and unrelated areas of business, taking over or merging with other corporations, and forming so-called co-operative networks with other corporations in order to benefit from economies of scope.
This is partly made possible by the continuous blurring of the boundaries between industries, thanks to the emerging computer and communication technologies, especially to the technological process called convergence. It is affecting education, banking, insurance, retailing, advertising, and a host of other industries, as the usual ways of adding and delivering value in these industries are being continuously redefined. The final shape of things to come in the so-called new economy will not be known until some time. Consequently there is a pressure on corporations to spread their activities and not risk losing relevance by sticking to some old economy models alone.
This too poses a host of new challenges. The problem of finding appropriate strategic partners is one of these challenges. Once a partner organisation is identified, managers of one corporation now have to develop mechanisms for working with other corporations so as to derive synergies. One of the more difficult challenges is to keep such large and diversified corporate entities sufficiently nimble and responsive to fast-changing circumstances in multiple areas of activities. Related to this are the difficulties of orienting people to be more flexible in their approach to skill development and encouraging them to take more and more responsibilities. Widening of the scope also results in an increase in the number of stakeholder groups relevant to a corporation. Serving their information needs and satisfying their changing and ever-growing demands are emerging as difficult challenges.
A summary of the emerging difficult tasks and challenges is now produced below:
1. Making better forecasts of economic and political events
2. Making better assessments of global investment proposals
3. Improving upon the existing methods of risk management
4. Strengthening the capacity of corporations for strategic management
5. Defining long-term objectives for a variety of organisations and activities
6. Identifying suitable performance indicators
7. Developing successful planning and implementation methods
8. Improving monitoring and evaluation methods so as to permit effective use of their results
9. Developing methods of consensus building
10. Supporting groups of people trying to address complex and interdependent problems
11. Improving co-ordination of operations at a global scale
12. Helping huge organisations adapt to local situations without diluting the corporate standards of performance and without subduing the corporate image
13. Maintaining a sense of shared values within a large corporation
14. Structuring the decision making process within multi-local and complex organisations
15. Integrating individual employees’ experiences to corporate memory and corporate learning
16. Finding appropriate strategic partners
17. Developing mechanisms for working with other corporations so as to derive synergies
18. Keeping large and diversified corporate entities sufficiently nimble and responsive to fast-changing circumstances in multiple areas of activities
19. Orienting people to be more flexible in their approach to skill development and encouraging them to take more and more responsibilities
20. Serving the information needs of multiple stakeholder groups and satisfying their changing and ever-growing demands
These challenges have to be seen in the context of the four diversities mentioned in Section 2 earlier. If management has to remain a relevant discipline, it has to extend its repertoire of skills and methods considerably in order to provide the necessary support to the corporations, which are playing a more deep-seated role in the emerging social order.
4. Pluralistic Thinking in Management
The management profession needs to find suitable ways of dealing with the diversities (i.e., those described in Figure 1) so as to persistently extend its repertoire of skills and methods in dealing with the challenges of the emerging socio-economic order. Let us consider the diversities one by one and characterise the emerging new thinking in dealing with them. This is presented in the form of a table below (Table 1).
The new thinking in management appears to embrace the plurality of stakeholders, and of rationalities, concepts, and methodologies, as a given. Furthermore, it appears to pursue the strategy of bringing these multiple standpoints to so interact that the overall effect is positive on the organisation in question. To elucidate the point, let us consider one of the difficult tasks, say number 5 above (in Section 3): Defining long-term objectives for a variety of organisations and activities. This challenge takes on a particular hue when viewed through the kaleidoscope of plurality. The long-term objectives would then have to be relevant to all the stakeholder groups and should not remain hostage to any one rationality. The objectives have to be rich enough to allow the interplay of a plurality of concepts and have to be shaped and embedded in the organisation through the application of multiple methodological standpoints.
How might this be accomplished? This paper argues that there is no systematic account of the process through which this might be accomplished. The kinds of competence required to accomplish this are not well articulated within the management literature. Although specific methods and skills required in addressing one or a few of the challenges might be available, there is a need to visualise and articulate a general approach to address the entire question of professional competence building in management in the present context. Broadly speaking, the approach should strive to ensure that the emerging pluralistic thinking in management is used as a resource in addressing the challenges facing the management profession. Section 5 presents the rough outlines of such an approach.
Table 1. Dealing with the diversities
| Type of Diversity | Conventional Treatment | New Thinking |
| Diversity of stakeholders’ interests | Emphasise one set of stakeholders (usually the shareholders) over the rest | Recognise the importance of all the stakeholder groups; build systems for information sharing; facilitate stakeholders’ interaction; enable stakeholders to contribute effectively to the corporation |
| Diversity of recommendations | Identify one set of recommendations as legitimate and ignore the rest | Allow multiple sources of recommendations based on multiple rationalities; develop mechanisms to increase the chances of more creative recommendations to emerge |
| Diversity of management ideas | Specialise on one or a small number of them, viewing the others as management fads | Create an environment in which various management ideas can be reflected upon, linked to each other, improved, and applied; capture the learning from such processes into organisational and professional memory |
| Diversity of intervention methodologies | Pursue a narrow set of methodologies consistent with the values, beliefs, skills, and temperament of the intervenor as well as those of the client organisation | Based on the relative strengths of the methodologies, pursue a simultaneous flourishing of all of them; create mechanisms for their reflective conversation with one another |
5. Approaches to Competence Building
Two prevalent approaches to competence building will be considered here, namely objective approach and pragmatic approach, before introducing the self-organisation approach.
5.1 Objective Approach
This approach seeks to build a reliable knowledge base that can be used by managers. Competence building in this case amounts to a dual process: (i) a continuous accumulation and enrichment of the knowledge base and (ii) a systematic transfer of that knowledge base to the members of the profession. The work of a vast majority of management schools is premised upon this approach. This is in fact an established approach in several other professions too, e.g., the medical profession.
Despite the sound logic of this approach, two basic difficulties are encountered in following it in an area such as management. (The difficulties are also felt in many other professions, including the medical profession, as we shall see.) Firstly, it is still not clear whether there is something like a stable reality (e.g., human anatomy) involving stable properties and relations that might be discovered through research in management. Secondly, the profession cannot wait indefinitely for some objective knowledge to be created in an area that requires a professional response now.
5.2 Pragmatic Approach
In this approach, the professionals use whatever tricks seem to work in comparable situations. With periodic experience sharing among the practitioners, a number of solutions are developed over a period of time. Again we find examples of this in the medical profession. The general advice these days to avoid what is called cot death (the unexplained death of young babies while sleeping) is to place the baby on its back, perhaps for easier breathing. The underlying causes of this malaise are not known (in the sense of objective knowledge) but the above advice seems to work. In fact, this approach to competence building covers a much larger proportion of professional competence in management than the objective approach.
However, there are a number of weaknesses of this approach too. Apart from the risks of wrong recommendations, there is also the uncertainty that an individual practitioner’s wisdom may not translate effectively into collective intelligence. Therefore, there is still a need to identify other approaches that would overcome some of the weaknesses of the objective and the pragmatic approaches.
5.3 Self-Organisation Approach
This approach focuses on the area excluded by the above two approaches. This is an area where neither an underlying stability is found (about which objective knowledge could be accumulated) nor the potential for building up appreciable competence through the automatic convergence of ‘what seems to work’. In the current scenario of management practice almost each challenge before the profession appears to point to such an area. Consider one of the challenges listed above in Section 3: Orienting people to be more flexible in their approach to skill development and encouraging them to take more and more responsibilities (Challenge # 19). This challenge is difficult to meet through the earlier two approaches. The objective approach might succeed in finding some personality attributes that make for flexibility. But the task of using this knowledge to actually orient a group of people to be more flexible will require some other innovation. The pragmatic approach might succeed in identifying a number of alternative local answers (e.g., giving more and more autonomy to work teams, imparting some specialised behavioural training, or providing strong/inspirational leadership). But the optimal choice in a specific situation is likely to remain indeterminate.
The crux of the self-organising approach lies in the spontaneous construction of a resource (e.g., system, network, framework, process, environment, etc.) that functions as the basis of a unique competence. A natural expression of this approach can be found among fire ants—a group of species who have inculcated a unique competence to survive during floods. When uprooted from their colonies due to flooding the fire ants spontaneously form a raft-like mass (what is conceived as a resource here) that just floats downstream until the water subsides (or it encounters high ground) and the ants then form new colonies there.
In this approach, it is important to nurture and develop the ability of managers to be so related to each other that they are able to come together spontaneously to bring forth some unique resource that can be used in responding to some challenge. There can be different implementations of this approach. One of them is implied by the notion of knowledge networks. Another is implied by the idea of learning community. In each of these, there is an awareness that the current challenges before management require new competencies not existing within the profession today. Since it is not already known how such competencies might be created, the profession should allow the possibility for the spontaneous bringing forth of new types of resource through appropriate forms of interaction among the present actors, skills, knowledge bases, etc.
This implies a critical domain for innovations in management today is the domain of designing appropriate forms of interaction. The designs should increase the chances of new resources being created collectively by harnessing the diversities described earlier (Figure 1). Elements of such thinking can be found emerging in management and elsewhere (Clarke and Clegg, 2000; Dash, 1999; McTaggart, 1997; Zeeuw, 1992).
6. Role of Collaborative Technologies
Collaborative technologies (or co-operative technologies) refer to a class of systematic technological support to co-operative action (i.e., people working in groups). Currently it is a major area of research and application of information and communication technology. Examples of collaborative technologies are Web-based chat tools, Web-based asynchronous conferencing tools, listservs, communicating whiteboards, collaborative writing tools, multi-user domains, group decision support systems (GDSS), etc. Recent developments along these lines can be found in the areas of computer supported co-operative work (CSCW), collaborative design process, participatory planning, co-ordination science, interactive management, collaborative problem solving environments, etc.
Distributed workgroups are becoming the norm in many large technology-intensive organisations. Team members may be in the next office or several time zones apart. Teams may be working on generating ideas to respond to a changing business environment or they may be jointly designing an artefact. Collaborative technologies aim to help them work together effectively.
It will be argued in this section that collaborative technologies will play a crucial role in effecting the so-called self-organisation approach to competence building in management. This approach, as described earlier, is based on the idea that under appropriate circumstances managers can come together spontaneously to bring forth some unique resource that can be used in responding to some professional challenge. Collaborative technologies are necessary in creating the required circumstances and supporting such spontaneous coming together.
There are certain obstacles before such spontaneous interaction. Broadly, three classes of obstacles can be identified: (i) computational complexity, (ii) plurality of worldviews, and (iii) systematically distorted communication (these are based on the ideas of the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the system theorist Michael Jackson). Collaborative technologies promise to address each of these obstacles. The issue of computational complexity is handled by harnessing the computational power of machines. For example, the task of structuring organisational objectives into some kind of hierarchy (an important task in corporate planning) can involve enormous computational complexity. However, once an appropriate algorithm is made available (e.g., one such algorithm has been developed by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Integrative Sciences, see their homepage at http://www.gmu.edu/departments/t-iasis/) the computational task can be delegated to a computer.
The problem of plurality of worldviews can arise in designing, planning, and other distributed decision making situations. The role of technology here would be to make the worldviews as explicit as possible for all the participants to see, to work out the long-term implications of adopting one worldview instead of another in making a choice, demonstrating the limited nature of each worldview, suggesting possible accommodations among these worldviews, and finally encouraging the participants to broaden their horizons and adopt a critical and reflective stance with respect to a worldview that is finally adopted.
The issue of systematically distorted communication is related to differences in power and privilege among the participants, disparity in the levels of their communicative competence, and the lack of a level playing field in general. The use of collaborative technologies here would have the following aims: to reduce the influence of power differentials by suitably altering the context, to provide specific rules of interaction thus overcoming the problem of differential communicative competence, to restrict and mediate the interactions suitably so as to prevent domination by specific participants, to set free local knowledges relevant to the task at hand, and finally, if possible, to translate the issue into one of multiple worldviews or even into one of computational complexity.
Well-designed and well-supported interactions increase the chances of new resources being created collectively. The above paragraphs indicate some elements of such designs. The research fields that provide new ideas on such designs are the ones engaged in the study of collective phenomena arising at sub-atomic, atomic, molecular, organismic, and social/cultural levels. Several research fields have been dealing with the spontaneous emergence of order (or pattern) within their domains of investigation. So pervasive have been these phenomena that a number of interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives dealing with these have emerged and attracted researchers from different backgrounds. Examples of such perspective would include self-organisation theory (see Cybernetics, Systems Theory and Complexity page at http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc/complexity.html), actor-network theory (see Actor-Network Theory page at http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/act_net.html), coversation theory (see Cybernetics and Conversation page at http://www.pangaro.com/published/cyb-and-con.html), and co-ordination theory (see The Center for Coordination Science page at http://ccs.mit.edu/).
The ongoing research using these theoretical perspectives should provide a number of ideas to innovate new forms of interaction as well as new breeds of collaborative technologies to implement these.
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