I know there is some study of it in left-wing political groups, both writing by people within such groups, and some sociological study of them by outsiders. One of the manifestations of dissatisfaction with both Leninism/Stalinism's ultra hierarchical style on the one hand, and the emergence of "union bosses" in the trade-union movement on the other, was a strong ideological attachment to radically non-hierarchical organization among groups like anarchists, council communists, etc. And one of the immediate problems that comes up is non-transparent, de facto cliques and networks of behind-the-scenes leaders. There's been a bunch of ink spilled on trying to come up with consensus-based organizational methods and best practices that aim to avoid that and produce "actual" non-hierarchy rather than just the superficial look of non-hierarchy. In some brief searching I haven't come up with any particularly good summary to point to, though, and I don't know if there's any consensus (ha ha) on whether any methods are more successful than others.
In a different vein, there's a lot of academic stuff written on Scandinavian workplace management, which is not precisely flat, but has flattish hierarchies based more on rotating and interlocking committees, rather than boss-and-subordinates tree structures. The goal there seems to be to make the sub-groups that are making decisions overt, so informal cliques don't make the decisions. So there are a lot of committees, with rotating membership to make sure they don't develop into hierarchies. E.g. 5 people are chosen to be responsible for something like working conditions, or strategic direction, or integration of foreign workers, for a term of a year or two, and then a different 5 people will hold that power next year. A big controversy there is how much Scandinavian workplace management is tied to Scandinavian culture, i.e. would it work anywhere else?
This is a more problem than networks vs hierarchies since both face this problem. All companies that succeed by definition start with a successful social structure, but as a companies increases the number of employees the social structure has trouble scaling. Clausewitz discusses a simple example of this with an army, as the army grows the number of links in the chain from a commander to a unit increases. He proposes a number of solutions (increase the unit size, increase the branching degree, split the army, etc) but in typical Clausewitzian fashion admits there is an inherent trade off between size and effectiveness.
Valve maybe choosing to stay small to avoid scaling beyond their effective structure. This is a counter-intuitive strategy in the world of bigger is better, but I'm interested in seeing how it plays out.
Valve shouldn't be a surprise. Despite all the ink spilled over management literature, even normal companies are typically full of dysfunction. There is no royal road to getting rid of defacto bosses.
> Valve maybe choosing to stay small to avoid scaling beyond their effective structure.
I wouldn't call 300 people a small number for the size of a company.
In fact, Jeri Ellsworth addresses this point (I'm quoting the transcript by develop-online [0]):
"Their structure probably works really well with about 20 people, but breaks down terribly when you get to a company of 300 people. Communication was a problem. That's where management… Well if I had anything to do differently, would be to make sure a layer of management could do communication correctly."
So it looks like Valve has already scaled beyond their effective structure.
>So it looks like Valve has already scaled beyond their effective structure.
Such scaling problems are not binary. They are probably less effective than they were at 20 people but they would be even less effective at 30,000. One way we might look at this is to assume (incorrectly) that a flat hierarchy is a complete graph which is the way most small informal groups are run.
A complete graph of 30 people has 435 edges.
A complete graph of 300 people has 44,850 edges.
A complete graph of 3000 people has 4,498,500 edges.
"Witches are not by nature gregarious, at least with other witches, and they certainly don't have leaders. Granny Weatherwax was the most highly-regarded of the leaders they didn't have."
Fascinating to think that the organizational methods I saw on Youtube videos of OWS decision making groups last year is an echo of a response to Leninism. Any recommendations to sources on this connection in case I want to follow up?
Ah, good question. Establishing causality is tricky. I think it's a widely held view that the non-hierarchical approach gained popularity on the left, especially among younger people in the West, partly as a reaction to Leninism. But I don't know if anyone's explicitly written on that; I would be interested in someone tracing that myself. Someone recommended to me David Graeber's The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement (2013), an account of the origins/ideology of Occupy Wall Street, but I haven't read it and don't know if it covers that. (Graeber is an anarchist politically and an anthropologist by training, so read accordingly.)
The origins of the hierarchy/nonhierarchy dispute on the left are a bit clearer, if that's what you're looking for. The polemics between Marx and Bakunin would be one place to start to see that side of it. To over-simplify, Bakunin thought that Marx's views had a dangerous authoritarian tinge that risked just replacing one kind of authoritarian government with a different one; while Marx thought Bakunin was an idealistic hippie out of touch with real-world situations, whose views would at best go nowhere, and at worst result in the workers' movement getting crushed as they spent all day holding disorganized meetings. For a later historical episode, something about the May '68 protests in France would probably have something informative. They were led by young leftists with non-hierarchical views, and opposed by the more orthodox French Communist Party. But I don't know as much as I'd like about that period, either, apart from the Situationists producing a lot of clever slogans.
I'm familiar in passing with Bakunin and Marx, so I'm not really surprised by anarchist tendencies in modern progressive movements. The passing down of mores, forms and customs among groups that tend to eschew tradition is interesting to contemplate. This particular thread of transmission (if it holds) has a satisfying symmetry to it. Especially if you, uh, enjoy historical ironies.
It's pretty obvious that hierarchy performs a necessary function. The focus should be on approximating a hierarchy of merit. Perhaps employees should be hired and tasks assigned by weighted vote, with a handicap for those who've performed well on a company betting market which predicts when x employee will finish a task and the quality of his/her work. The whole process could be made anonymous, provided the market is a play money affair.
Hierarchy introduces a bunch of serious problems, for instance:
1. information is often collected at the leaf nodes, so it must flow up the chain-of-command to be used effectively
2. power creates perverse incentives to distort information as it travels up the hierarchy, even when it doesn't information is distorted as it is compressed for fewer and fewer people (see executive summary)
3. hierarchies have to wait for signals to go up the tree and back down to act (which is why the US military has non-hierarchical decision making in places), this makes "tall" hierarchies slow to react
4. corruption of single node in a hierarchy can disrupt all nodes below or above it in non-obvious ways
5. hierarchies tend to have extremely critical nodes and cascading failure modes
Use of such structures should always be considered within the framework of a trade-off.
In regards to points 4 and 5, 'flat' hierarchies still have nodes that are more connected than others and wield greater influence than others. These have the same failings.
I would argue that well designed organisations or networks should have enough connections to route around/detect minor damage/corruption and quickly isolate the problem. For instance small world networks have this property http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network .
Not all nodes in flat human networks are likely to be equal in information flow, but a plurality of high degree nodes does somewhat mitigate cascading failure due to disconnection but may increase cascading failure due to interconnection such as viruses.
You obviously know more about this than me. I suppose, I shouldn't have posed such a strong thesis - my English teacher would be very cross if she were to hear about this. As usual, everything is more nuanced and interesting when investigated in some detail.
In a different vein, there's a lot of academic stuff written on Scandinavian workplace management, which is not precisely flat, but has flattish hierarchies based more on rotating and interlocking committees, rather than boss-and-subordinates tree structures. The goal there seems to be to make the sub-groups that are making decisions overt, so informal cliques don't make the decisions. So there are a lot of committees, with rotating membership to make sure they don't develop into hierarchies. E.g. 5 people are chosen to be responsible for something like working conditions, or strategic direction, or integration of foreign workers, for a term of a year or two, and then a different 5 people will hold that power next year. A big controversy there is how much Scandinavian workplace management is tied to Scandinavian culture, i.e. would it work anywhere else?