As unexpected as this may sound, postmodern organization is not the most dramatic transformation of the twenty- first century. Far more apt symbols of the new age can be found in the postmodern- coordinated systemic network and the tendency toward collaborative cohesion. In this sense, Castells's (1996) The Rise of the Network Society signifies an appropriate name, even if the book fails to describe the variety of new networks that have evolved in postmodern organizations internally for team management and learning (Argote and Miron- Spektor 2011; Burns and Stalker 1961; Denning 2014; Laloux 2014; Robertson 2007) or externally in systemic networks of varying degrees of goal complexity and coordination (Alter and Hage 1993; Hage 2011). Anyone who has followed the interorganizational literature of the past 40 years must be struck by how the goals of these arrangements have shifted from (1) simply learning about other countries, to (2) engaging in joint ventures to develop new products (Kraar 1989; Powell and Brantley 1992), to (3) forming global alliances (Gomes- Casseres 1996; Moxon et al. 1988) and industrial consortiums, such as Airbus in Europe and SEMATECH in the United States (Browning et al.1995; Carayannis and Alexander 2004)— and all of this occurred before the new millennium. Since then, perhaps the most interesting transformation in the United States has been the movement of certain supply chains away from contractual and exploitative relationships toward more collaborative ones (Whitford 2005). Here, the model is the well- known Japanese vertical keiretsu (Gerlach 1992; Womack et al. 1990). Not to be outdone, coordinated systemic networks have emerged as the norm in the noneconomic sector and in some parts of the United States; these networks involve collaboration among organizations to support the achievement of complex goals (Alter and Hage 1993). At the interorganizational level, such tight connections include interorganizational coordination that substitute for markets, which marks a truly radical institutional transformation.

Even more dramatic but still somewhat misunderstood are transformations that have been occurring at the interpersonal level, including the rise of a number of platform technologies such as Facebook, Reddit, MySpace, TikTok, and various dating sites (Ling 2008; Rosenfeld and Thomas 2012). At the interpersonal level, some of these attachments represent connections that are radically tighter than even those found in the traditional localities described in Chapter Two.