HANDBOOK Of NEW MEDIA Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs

Introduction NOSHIR S. CONTRACTOR ,ic!~ cntor the twenty-first century, new media are iunil,mlcntally challenging conventional wisdom &I qetlizations and organizing. However, well kfort the tsnn 'new media' first gained currency ~l nl o\ L three decades ago, scholars have been inter-Tad I I I questions concerning the relationship k~\~n ctnerging communication technologies and ~~m~c~nporary forms of organizing. At the turn oihc rwcnGeth century, the inventions of tele-phon!. tclqraphy and electro-mechanical typeset-eng1tkniger, 1986; Yates, 1989) played a key role in ~~l q>or t t " ~g the dominant organizational forms Bat sustnincd the industrial revolution: bureaucracy fll'chu. ~ lortns relied heavily on the new tnedia of the umr ((1 ljcilitate the flow of information up the hmchy ah well as the downward flow of orders. T&y. recent inventions, spawned by the con-\ r ' r \ ~ot i nt ~d convergence of all media into the ~~mm~~ clllrency of digital bits and bytes, are o n t o : ,qnin accompanied by a discourse about fun-i l ~~~n~nl l y new forms of organizing. In this po;mtlustrial era (Bell, 1973) there is general con-mu\ that new forms of organizing, which are 1 1 1 c l ! 1 1 1 be knowledge intensive (Badaracco, 1991) and ayle (Goldman et al., 1995), will supplant the mtical hierarchies of their bureaucratic predeces-yl l i. Usilig as an example the software industry, !qmond (1999) argues that the 'bazaar' (the chaot i c marketplace exemplified by Linux and $I Open Source Movement) will eclipse the I 'cathedral' (exemplified by hierarchical organizations like Microsoft) as the preferred mode of organizing. In a more tempered vein some, such as Williamson (1996), have argued that these new forms of organizing will instead represent hybrids of hierarchies and markets. Others posit the emergence of net-Still others argue that these more enduring organizational forms will be replaced by the rise of a more ephemeral e-lance (electronic freelance) economy (Malone and Laubacher, 1998). The relationship between new media and these new forms of organizing is a focal point of considerable interest and debate among organizational scholars. It is also the central concern of each of the chapters in this part on 'New Media and Organi-zing'. The contributions to this part review, critique and extend the theories we need for understanding the complex interrelationships between new media and new forms of organizing and discuss the analytic tools we need for investigating thetn. …