Stability and plasticity in self-organized networks

Abstract

– Despite some research on self-management and self-organization, the control and the coordination of an organization without hierarchy remains a mysterious phenomenon. However, the dissemination of the responsibilities and the decentralized decisions in a business network require improving our knowledge in this field. From this theoretical point of view, our article aims to explore the modes of development and regulation of the networks not supervised. After having underlined the difficulties of empirical observation at the origin of the modeling attempts, we put forward the idea according to which a network without pilot is pulled about two tensions: stability and plasticity. Indeed, to mitigate the problems of internal coherence, it is led to evolve towards a more stable form and thus more hierarchical. But, in the absence of central coordination unit, it is also directed towards a more unstable form, based on the flexibility of the embedded connections. Classification Codes: M10.