Knowledge work, knowledge workers, industrial structures.

The weak ties world often appears more as a threat than an opportunity for unions and our members. The problems we confront can be so challenging that it is easier to ignore them than acknowledge and face them. Part of the problem is that many union members, along with the sectors and the organizations where they work, do not recognize themselves as knowledge workers and knowledge industries. Health care is a prime example: usually run on an industrial model with a mixed population of professionals and non-professionals, employees and contractors, there is little to differentiate much of day-to-day  management and working conditions from old-fashioned factory work. As a consequence, union representation often looks much like old-fashioned factory floor representation.  These obsolete organizational structures have to go, but how?

Union members have to ask themselves how much of their work is thinking for a living. How many of the important tools they bring to their work reside in their heads? How much of their hands-on work requires the use of sophisticated technologies and high-level skills? Next, they need to look around and ask how much their work place reflects their abilities? How different is the language in their collective agreement from that of a mill worker or an auto worker? Because the reality is that fewer and fewer of us work in those industrial jobs, yet we continue to inhabit the conceptual as well as the physical models of the past. How to imagine a different, richer reality, one that for many of us has not yet arrived?

Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation ) cites an imagining tool he has dubbed the adjacent possible which nicely describes the problem we face – something near at hand but out of view.

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Each new combination ushers new combinations into the adjacent possible. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace.

The adjacent possible is a place of opportunities. It's the status quo that represents the threat.

On the lighter side ????

The dark side of the weak links world.

Weak Ties: the Mesh

Lisa Gansky's TED talk illustrates the ubiquity of the Weak Ties environment. It isn't going away!

TED talks, Lisa Gansky

Weak Ties, Porous Walls

In "Where Good Ideas Come From," Steven Johnson points to Twitter as an instance of the platform model for innovative development:
Twitter's creators recognized that there was another kind of competitive advantage that came from complete openness: the advantage that comes from having the largest and most diverse ecosystem of software applications being built on your platform. Call it cooperative advantage.
In a Weak Ties world, what is true for the product is also true for the producer, and the producer who relies exclusively on those within her own organization for production, development and innovation will find herself at a distinct cooperative and competitive disadvantage. In the Strong Ties world of industrial unionism the ethic has been to defend ownership of work through division of labour, strong seniority rights, closed shop certifications etc. The "walls" around work have become very porous in the pursuit of complete openness in the Weak Ties world of networked knowledge work. When the internet is both the work place and the market place, how do unions reimagine ways of addressing  issues of social and economic justice that persist and often thrive in the virtual reality of commercial endeavour?

The Guardian is facing the challenges head on.

Challenges for a "strong ties" culture

The exporting of well-paid industrial jobs from developed nations to lower-wage countries provides an analogue to the new reality that the internet has effectively lowered the transmission costs of redistributing knowledge work to zero. As a consequence, companies no longer expect innovation and product development to occur exclusively from within, but have developed strategies to draw on a fluid and dynamic network of contributors to their projects. If ownership of work and jobs has become problematic for traditional industries, applying the concept to the new paradigm raises enormous problems for unions and for workers. A workforce already groomed for frequent changes of career is now grappling with the concept of employment as a succession of projects, even as a succession of projects for which they compete. Conceptualizing the issues in terms of mapping the solutions of our industrial past onto the digital present and future is an exercise in futility. Strong ties developed within the physical infrastructure of the past do not bind in the physically unconstrained networks of the knowledge economy. Will unions represent workers within these networks? Will workers look to unions for representation? What would that representation look like? Where would union power reside? As Darwin said, the organism that survives is the one most adaptable to change. How will we meet the challenges?

About Weak Ties

Weak Ties is a descriptor often employed to characterize the sprawling network of connections established in social media. The term is frequently used pejoratively, for instance when comparing the term "friend" as it applies to a virtual relationship on Facebook to its application in a physical social setting.
In a 1981 paper, The strength of weak ties:a network theory revisited, (Mark Granovetter, State University of New York, Stony Brook), a different assessment of weak ties emerges, in which acquaintances (weak ties) connect disparate social groups (strong ties) creating opportunities otherwise denied to both groups.

The macroscopic side of this communications argument is that
social systems lacking in weak ties will be fragmented and incoherent.
New ideas will spread slowly, scientific endeavors will be handicapped,
and subgroups separated by race, ethnicity, geography, or other
characteristics will have difficulty reaching a modus vivendi. (Granovetter)

The purpose of the Weak Ties blog is to situate trade unions, the epitome of the "strong ties" organization, built around the concept of solidarity, in a world transforming at dizzying speed through the deployment of  powerful, "weak ties" networking technologies.
In the recently published book Macrowikinomics, Don Tapscott writes:

The institutions that established the historic social bargains that underpinned post-world war II prosperity (i.e. national governments, business associations, and organized labour) are no longer the right ones to help rebuild the global economy or fashion a new form of sustainable governance.

Weak Ties will examine the ways in which organized labour might evolve in order to remain relevant and engaged in a weak ties world.