In the much-neglected final part of Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, E.F. Schumacher included an essay entitled Towards A Theory of Large Scale Organisation. The essay was based on his experience at the National Coal Board during the 1950s and 1960s when coal was still being mined in the UK.

When Lord Robens and Fritz Schumacher first started to address the management problems of the largest organisation in Europe, they found themselves dealing with a typical first-generation company...defined in my radcon paper The Future for Large Organisations. These companies dominated the industrial life of the early and middle years of the 20th century and their names...Ford, Edison, du Pont, Unilever etc... were regarded as bywords for industrial efficiency.

Robens and Schumacher strongly disagreed and set about inventing something completely different. By the end of their time at the helm, the National Coal Board had been transformed into a Second-Generation Large Organisation. In North America much the same transformation took place at the General Electric.

Not everybody welcomed the shift. On Wall Street and in the City of London it gradually dawned on the Bankers and their Derivative Rrofessions that they were engaged in a fight to the death with the Industrialists for control of these Second Generation Large Organisations. By creating their own portfolios of strategic business units within their own organisation, Producing Companies can outflank the Moneylenders by effectively issuing their own currencies as transferable shares and bonds through the Stock Exchanges and through private placements through Nominee Companies and other legally sanctioned devices.

Future historians may view the shenanigans around the ignominious collapse of Pehr G. Gyllenhammer’s several attempts to merge Sweden’s Volvo Corporation with Norway’s Oil Industry as the crucial watershed in the battle between the power to organise the Means of Exchange and the Means of Production…two competing phrases introduced by Sidney Webb as Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution. Bankers are redundant when they lose the power to deploy monetary patronage to create their own portfolios and effectively hire and fire the Producers.

Henry Ford was perhaps the first industrialist to recognize this soft underbelly in the seeming omnipotence of the Money Power. But many inventors…like Thomas Edison in the USA and Gustav de Laval in Sweden…had previously fallen fowl of the counter measures deployed by both the money and production powers to protect their special privileges from encroachment by either the personal or the common weal and were destroyed.

The current crop of Transnational Corporations sitting astride today’s world of globalisation are the survivors of these civil wars. After years of trench warfare an uneasy truce has settled over the battlefield. But during the past two decades a third-generation of large organisation has emerged unnoticed into this stand-off between money and know-how. They constitute a second front in what is effectively a continuation of the classic Marxist battleground for control of the Means of Production between Labour and Capital.

These Third Generation Large Organisations are the subject of the interim report of my study of Swedish IT firms. These often vast networks of inter-working firms and individuals come in two very different genres. Sometimes they out-source the products and services they need and put these through the books as Cost of Sales to generate enormous corporate incomes per employee. Sometimes they re-source the development of products and services by burning vast amounts of speculative money in selling Future Profit Dreams.

These large Network Organisations seem to take two forms. Either they are Barrow Boys selling dear and buying cheap...preferably in that order...or they are Boffins 'n Nerds fronted by private funds and venture capitalists. The profit and loss statements of the former appear to the world as all income with no expense while that of the latter are all expense with no income.

But a Fourth Generation is silently feeling its way into being…below the radar. Its deconstruction and description is just a glint in my eye. I believe it may have a historic provenance. But to understand this fourth form of organisation a third parameter is needed that deals with the form of organisation and cuts across the two-dimensional First, Second and Third-generation Large Organisations.

I speculate that there are three relevant organisational forms…the Hierarchic, the Hanseatic and the Holonic…and that over the thousand year period from 1200 to 2200 much of the world will have undergone a transition from the Holonic to the Hanseatic to the Hierarchic...and back again.

Human life in our North Atlantic Ocean Basin has seen fit to confine itself to the shallow regions around its rim. Because most of our ancestors came to where they are today by way of an extensive network of Water Trails, they tend to be huddled about the River Estuaries.

With the advent of telephony these families and clans are just a few seconds away from each other. And with low-cost air travel any place on the planet can be reached from any other place within a day. We can get up with family and go to bed in the evening with family. This Web of Interrelationships has the ability to reclaim the power leaked to the Impersonal Megamachine…and bring us Liberty.