ILPC 2027

`Smart’ organizing and management seems to be the newest trend in organization and (human resource) management. It is difficult to find a good definition of smart organizing, organizations and HRM. Most items on internet regard the design of smart organizing and smart organizations the way(s) `smart’ can be helpful for organizations, but a good description of what that means is lacking. Most concrete definitions can be found with consultancy firms like Cordis and Atos, who state that: “Due to the actual state of ICT organizations can operate as knowledge-driven, internetworked, dynamically adaptive to new organizational forms and practices, learning as well as agile in their abilities to create and exploit the opportunities offered by the new economy”(Cordis, 2014?), and: “Smart Organization integrates collaboration into business processes to ensure access to the right content when required both within and outside the organization. It comprises the implementation of social technologies to facilitate collaboration and information exchange between people” From these definitions it is not fully clear what smart organizations or smart organizing are. Are smart organizations a new type of organization compared to the existing ones or is a new way of organizing in existing types of organizations? Close reading of the rather fuzzy texts suggests the last although no more information is given about the way these ideas about smart can be applied in existing organizations. Other authors, however, look at smart organizing as a next `stage’ in the development of organizations. Rifkin (2011, 2014) for example sees smart organizing as the culmination of the third industrial revolution that started in 1980’s with the introduction of computers and internet and the subsequent digitalization of society with similar effects as the use of steam during the first industrial revolution (from 1820-1870) and of electricity during the second (from 1870-1980). Rifkin expects that the third industrial revolution and especially the Internet of Things will radically change existing societal institutions like the production and distribution of energy and the mobility system and will lead to more small scale and cooperative organizations. Others, like Brynjolfsson & McAfee (2014), speak of the second machine age with machines that deliver brain power in contrast to the machines that delivered muscle power during the first machine age. As a result they of this second machine age they expect digitalization of `almost everything’ with important effects on economy, society, employment, work etcetera. And again others even speak of the fourth industrial revolution that will change our ways of organizing completely, including the amount and content of work. Obviously it is not yet clear what smart organizing means and what the consequences will be for organizations and people. Thinking in subsequent industrial revolutions or organization development stages can be helpful to give us a wider and more comprehensive view on the changing characteristics of organizations over time and to understand what may be happening in the future. It can prevent us from focusing too much on the actuality and on specific peculiarities that attract our attention now but prove to be less important later on. We all know the examples of previous organizational hypes that were announced as radical changes to the existing way of organizing but in the end effected organizations only in a very limited way. However, stage approaches also show severe shortcomings. Most important thereof is the suggestion that specific types of organizing are related to specific historical periods and that in next periods they are replaced by other types of organizing. In practice however, basic types of organization coexist over long periods. Further, all stage models only start with the (first) industrial revolution while organizations and (human) resource management have a far longer history. Stage models are also based on a linear view of the development of industries, technology and organizations, while according to recent publications by prominent historians important economic and social developments, like the rise and decline of market economies and of (large) scale wage labor, took place several times in history (and on several places on earth). Also the development of technology cannot be seen as a purely linear process: some early technologies disappeared without being further applied while others were able to survive whether or not in an adapted form. A last shortcoming is the rather deterministic view on the effects of technology development in most models. Of course, changes in technology influence the amount and content of work, but - looking at history - the influence on organizing and (human resource) management itself is far less clear. Overall, in governance and (human) resource management there seems to be more continuity than mostly is thought. However, this topic has not been very well researched until now. Therefore this paper aims to contribute to our insights in this field. The core questions that will be dealt with are: What’s new and what not in organizing and (human) resource management over a longer period of time? And what is the role of new technology and smart organizing in this respect? Given the very general and ambitious character of these questions, we can only make a first start with answering it in this paper. We will do so by making use of a – long time – historical approach to the development of organizations. Bringing in experiences from the (far) past can help us to better understand the pace and amount of change in organizations and management over longer periods and so helping us to understand the relationship between actual forms of technology with ways of organizing and management in our time. Based on that we can also try to conclude whether smart organizing and smart (human resource) management are a next hype in organization and management or whether they are really something new.