"You are looking, on a microlevel, at the social relations of a new industrial epoch. The image is a "sociogram," charting interactions among university professors as they cross-pollinate with industrialists at a university research center. The spermlike penetration shows minimal administrative intervention into a budding embryo of research and development. It is upon such informal, nonhierarchical institutions that a brand new breed of capitalists pin their hopes. They have crossed the "second industrial divide," a restructuring of capitalism characterized by decentralized production and changed technologies of flexible specialization, technologies that impose a competitive strategy of permanent innovation-- hence the need to nurture new ideas and to keep their profit-making potential gestating within the proprietary domain of private firms.
These idea-producing clusters are enmeshed in global webs that, according to U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, catch approximately one-fifth of the U.S. population up into the global economy with prospects for a prosperous future, but threaten to leave much of the nation's workforce out in the cold.
To get a sense of how radical this restructuring is, compare its amorphous
sociogram with the classic model of the corporate firm that dominated the
economic landscape until two decades ago.
This form dates back to the turn of the century (the "first industrial divide") when continuous-process machinery initiated the mass production of standardized goods, leading to economies of scale that transformed the earlier system of family firms into "corporate" or "managerial" capitalism-- impersonally owned, giant corporations comprised of hundreds of operating units and thousands of workers, the internal operations of which were protected from competition. Each unit was managed by a hierarchy of salaried executives who, because surveillance and coordination are their primary tasks, have recently been vulnerable to replacement by computers, as disaggregating firms strive to trim their hierarchies and turn their managerial "fat" into profits.
When giant corporations reigned supreme, their top executives, "corporate statesmen," were close to political power...."
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