Network Logic
Who governs in an interconnected world?
Networks are the most important organisational form of our time, but are often mis-used and misunderstood. In this collection of essays, leading thinkers show how we can unlock their full potential.
You can also download individual essays from this collection
From the Internet to Al Qaeda, the teetering electricity grid to old school ties, we live in a world of networks. A profoundly disruptive shift has occurred in our societies, making networks the most important organisational form of our time and reshaping the activities of families, governments and businesses.
Our public response to these changes has so far been partial and fragmented. Although social, political and technological networks hold our modern world together, we lack the language to apply them to solving our common problems.
But if we can learn more accurately to understand the patterns and impacts of networks, we can begin to tap their full potential for organisation and decision-making, and to make possible new forms of coordination and collective action.
In this collection of essays, Demos seeks to address that challenge. Drawing on some of the world's leading thinkers on networks across a range of disciplines, we seek to distil the most important lessons from the study of networks and address some of the critical questions that our 'network society' presents: from the distribution of power and inequality to the future of civic participation and the impact of new technologies.
Embracing this network logic will help us to change not just our tools of intervention, but our ways of seeing the world.
01 - Introduction
02 - Living Networks - Fritjof Capra
03 - Towards a theory of government - Karen Stephenson
04 - Connexity revisited - Geoff Mulgan
05 - Untangling the threads - Ann Lieberman and Diane Wood
06 - Networks, knowledge and innovation - David H Hargreaves
07 - Leading between - Paul Skidmore
08 - The science of inequality - Mark Buchanan
09 - Old boys and new girls - Helen McCarthy
10 - Your friendship networks - Perri 6
11 - Developing the well-connected community - Alison Gilchrist
12 - Networks and neighbourhoods - Robert J Sampson
13 - Organising for success - Diane Coyle
14 - The information utility - John Taylor
15 - Smart mobs - Howard Rheingold
16 - The rise of network campaigning - Paul Miller
17 - Afterword: why networks matter - Manuel Castells
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