Article:

Conflicting Diagrams

Throughout the years new diagrams have appeared as solutions or threats to existing ones. Bureaucracy and hierarchy are diagrams; networks are too. In recent decades the primary conflict between organizational designs has been between hierarchies and networks, an asymmetrical war exemplified most starkly in the war against terrorism. But what happens when "the powers that be" evolve from centralized hierarchies into networked power? For Alex Galloway in the future we are likely to experience a general shift downward into a new bilateral organizational conflict-networks fighting networks.