Only Connect: Neat Words, Networks and Identities

In a networked economy and society, the connections between individual actors, organizations, and entire industries gain more importance than the entities themselves. As the contributions in this volume suggest, networks develop somewhat fragile identities that emerge through shared practices and language games. From this perspective, networks are an outcome of acts of language use, and their organizational practices unfold in and simultaneously constitute these networks. Providing rich empirical examples ranging from the Louvre to public sector organizations, from Jazz music to German franchising businesses, and, en route, taking in the networks of tacit knowledge in Japanese and Chinese organizations, the book's individual narratives are linked by one common thread: how acts of 'languaging' and heterogeneous practices contribute to the rise, and sometimes fall, of networks and how these networks perform complex tasks shaping organizations and, by extension, us.