Inventing the Organizations of the 21^st Century. Malone, Thomas W., Laubacher, Robert, and Scott Morton, Michael S. (Eds.). Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2003. 456 pages, 48 illus. Paper, 0-262-63273-X, US $30.00

Reviewed by: Doran O'Donnell, Louisiana State University -- Alexandria

Assessing, predicting, and controlling what the future holds for large corporations is at the forefront of the book, Inventing the Organizations of the 21^st Century. Essentially, this text is a collection of articles written by people who worked with MIT on a five year project attempting to predict not only what the organization of 2015 will look like, but also what can be done to help in its creation, and what exactly is it we want it to be. While the text offers a wide range of views regarding the future, sections of some of the articles chose by the editors are quite complex and, while worth the effort, would fare better as required reading for more advanced students of organizational theory than for students in undergraduate courses.

The role of technology has always seemed to be overshadowed by the costs of integrating systems that are capable of linking offices together, but the value of these services cannot be underscored. This is evident both in today’s ease of information transfer, and in the awesome responsibility of information management services in the near future. For years researchers have been touting how the global marketplace has changed organizational communication, but this text offers examples and reasonable assumptions about how the change will occur as more and more economies become reliant on information technology.

The first section of the book is focused on how information technology has helped organizations decentralize communication practices or, more precisely, has increased the ability for organizations to retain these practices as needed for sound decision making policies. This section seems the most relevant for organizational communication courses in that it relays what changes are already taking place and how information technology is currently working within and between organizations. A better understanding of communication flow will allow for the second and third sections to be better understood and evaluated by the reader, and the examples used illustrate the role and value of information technology completely. For example, access to cheaper and faster information transfer is key in helping consumer giants such as Wal-Mart compete in relatively small markets by allowing them to adapt their price structures for some products to meet the market demands of smaller customer bases, while at the same time maintaining exact pricing for most products sold in the national market. Without this technology, managers would have to rely on their own instincts for changes in pricing, or would not be able to adapt to these markets and lose market share. The value and roles of information technology is further underscored for Visa International, which in effect is a virtual organization owned by the many thousands of banks that use its services. Visa International is a discussion of radical decentralization, with IT at the heart of the organization, not only for transfer of the billions of purchases made through its reach, but also for the decision making prospects of its owner/customers, namely the banks that both use and own the service. All in all, these lively discussions show how radical decentralization works with technology and suggests that other organizations of the “here and now” can benefit from revisiting their information sharing services.

The second and third sections of the text basically ask what we can do to shape the organizations of the future, and what those organizations will look like and act as the central themes throughout the rest of the text. Ideally, the authors contend that information sharing technologies and communications play and will continue to play a central role in organization structure, decision-making, and maintenance. As the costs of information transfer continue to get cheaper, the necessity to use such technology will continue to grow. The authors argue for drastic changes in the ways we work in the near future as we continue to grow into a truly global economy and offer many suggestions for how those changes will, or should be made.

This text is an interesting mix of ideas and will make one think about work processes and changes, even from an individual level. It takes into account not only the profit-costs ratio of organization, but also the human elements that may work to make life easier for the worker, not just the organization. The collection of articles was well thought and the project a successful venture. All in all, the conceptual nature of some of the articles may be taxing for undergraduate students, but many of the articles are a “must read” for graduate students in organizational communication, management, or information technology.