Computing and organizations: what we know and what we don't know
Communications of the ACM - Special section on management of information systems
The decision-making paradigm of organizational design
Management Science
The impact of information systems on organizations and markets
Communications of the ACM
Information and organization for horizontal multimarket coordination
Management Science - Special issue: Frontier research on information systems and economics
Power, politics, and MIS implementation
Communications of the ACM
ASOPE and the Fabled Promise of Process Knowledge Capture and Reuse
BT Technology Journal
Information technology, organizational transformation, and business performance
Productivity, inequality, and the digital economy
Designing Coordination Systems for Distributed Teamwork
WETICE '03 Proceedings of the Twelfth International Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises
Consumer Empowerment Through Internet-Based Co-creation
Journal of Management Information Systems
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The logic in this paper shows why greater decentralization in business (including 'empowerment') is a response to fundamental changes in the economics of decision-making that are enabled by new information technologies. Our research suggests that a simple pattern of three successive stages underlies many of the changes that are taking place: As communication costs fall, independent decentralized decision-makers are replaced, first by centralized decision-makers, and then by connected decentralized decision-makers. This pattern explains important aspects of economic history in this century, and suggests that empowerment is not just a fad, but likely to become even more important in the next century.The paper also suggests that our very notions of centralization and decentralization are incomplete. When most people talk about empowerment, they are only thinking about going 'halfway' toward what is possible. To fully exploit the possibilities of new information technologies, we may need to expand our thinking to include 'radically decentralized organizations' — like the Internet and market economies.