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?