Reading both IT and business innovations, developments and highlights these days, I notice that collaboration keeps popping up as a central issue. In trying to answer the question why collaboration is so hot a topic for companies now, I quickly listed the reasons behind this. This blog post and my next "The networked age's economic model" is highly related. This morning, while reading Tom Friedman's The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, I was worried that he would stole my line. He didn't. He did mention some ideas close to some of the ideas I had, but focused on facts rather than analysis. Anyway, let's go back to the central question of collaboration.
My answer to the importance of collaboration today is the "organic solidarity" arisen from economic and social needs in a highly-specialized society. The term "organic solidarity" is from Emile Durchheim's The division of labor in society. In this work, the authors argued that "Different specializations in employment and social roles created dependencies that tied people to one another, since people no longer could count on filling all of their needs by themselves." I found 4 main driving forces for why this "organic solidarity" heightens the need for collaboration.
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