Power in the Networked Century
Interesting thoughts on hierarchies vs networks in this influential paper by Anne-Marie Slaughter, America’s Edge: Power in the Networked Century.
In this world, the measure of power is connectedness. Almost 30 years ago, the psychologist Carol Gilligan wrote about differences between the genders in their modes of thinking. She observed that men tend to see the world as made up of hierarchies of power and seek to get to the top, whereas women tend to see the world as containing webs of relationships and seek to move to the center. Gilligan’s observations capture the differences between the twentieth-century and the twenty-first-century worlds.