According to the digital discourse, network production brings about a shift in business culture as well. Larry Huston, an executive with Proctor & Gamble, depicts “the current R&D model” as “broken.” To overcome this crisis, the current model of tenured positions within R&D departments is replaced by a new employment model, which is flexible, ad hoc, and project-based—in short, networked. The locus of production becomes decreasingly the company, or the organization, and increasingly the network itself, an assemblage of disparate productive nodes that gather ad hoc for a particular project (Castells 1996, 168–72). Hence, from the point of view of companies, network production is seen as a solution to the constraints and limitations set forth by what a company is. It is instructive to recall here the etymology of the word. “Company” is a derivative of “companion,” from the Latin com (with) and panis (bread),<sup>9</sup> literally meaning “one who eats bread with another.”<sup>10</sup> According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it was first used in the twelfth century to mean “a body of soldiers” and in the sixteenth century came to mean “business association.” It is precisely the sense of communality, mutual responsibility, and exclusivity—sedimented in the etymology of the word company—that the new ethos of network production resists, revolutionizes, and in fact wishes to wither away.
Companies therefore increasingly open up to the network of talent, intellect, and knowledge that lies outside of their boundaries and incorporate the new spirit of networks into their operation. Proctor & Gamble’s shift to a network model is a case in point. In the past, the company was characterized by an “insular” corporate culture, which won it the nickname “the Kremlin on the Ohio” (Howe 2006). It first adopted the network architecture in-house, realizing that “cross-pollination” between different departments was a good thing for creativity and productivity. Later, it had become even more open, connecting to a much larger network via InnoCentive. This, says Huston, “changed how we define the organization . . . We have 9,000 people on our R&D staff and up to 1.5 million researchers working through our external networks. The line between the two is hard to draw” (Howe 2006).
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