Strategies for Distributed and Collective Action

How do we organize ourselves to accomplish shared goals? Our well-worn modes of collective action--from markets to hierarchies, from institutions to movements--have so far provided a limited vocabulary to investigate, let alone invent, new forms of open, networked, and trans-sectoral collaboration. Yet new forms of collective action are continually emerging, defined by openness, polycentricity, and plurality while still strategic and goal-oriented. Martin Kornberger pursues these experimental models to offer a vocabulary for the hitherto "untapped capability" to organize and strategize distributed and collective action. He introduces a novel set of concepts including shared concerns, symbols, interface designs, participatory architectures, evaluative infrastructures, network strategy, and leading as diplomacy, which together combine goal-orientated, purposeful action with scale, openness, and creativity. With a new vocabulary we can explore alternative ways of thinking and strategies to address the significant challenges and crises of our times.

Martin Kornberger is Chair in Strategy and International Management at the University of Edinburgh and a research fellow at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. He has lived and worked in Australia (University of Technology Sydney as Associate Professor in Design and Management and as Research Director of the Australian Creative Industry Innovation Centre), Denmark (Copenhagen Business School as Professor of Strategy and Organization) and France (EM Lyon as Professor of Management Innovation). He has also been a Visiting Professor or Fellow at Stockholm University, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and Aoyama Business School, Tokyo. With his philosophical background and rather eclectic bookshelf behind him, his work explores strategies for and organization of new forms of distributed collective action.

- 1: Introduction: Collective Action in Crisis?
- Part I. Inventory: Modes of Collective Action
- 2: Invisible Hand Explanations: Emergence, Markets, and Collective Action
- 3: Visible Hand Explanations: Hierarchy, Management, and Collective Action
- 4: Institutional Explanations: Commons, Conventions, and Collective Action
- 5: Grassroot Explanations: Movements, Identity, and Collective Action
- Passage
- 6: Changing Landscapes, New Maps: Conditions of the Possibility for Distributed and Collective Action
- Part II. Discovery: Figures of Thought for Distributed and Collective Action
- 7: On Purpose: Concerns, Symbols, North Stars
- 8: Organizing the Open: Interface Design, Participatory Architectures, and Evaluative Infrastructures
- 9: Network Strategy: A Sense of Direction
- 10: Enter the Diplomat: Leading Distributed Collectives
- 11: In Conclusion: The 18th Camel