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Throughout the 20th century, the industrial age roots of hierarchical top‐down planning and command‐and‐control supervision have been the foundations for management thinking. At the beginning of the 21st century, many futurists and systems thinkers have widely declared that businesses must equip themselves to be more responsive to rapidly changing environments. Dynamic, knowledge‐based businesses require that rigid forms of business governance give way to networked forms. Since many successful businesses have shifted from autonomous independent enterprises to building alliances and inter‐organizational relationships, we advocate a renewed examination of negotiated order and a focus on the fluidity enabled by it. The traditional advantages of legal order are being outweighed by its inherent rigidity. Under conditions of rapid change, maintaining an internally consistent set of rules, essential to legal order, is inefficient and relatively ineffective. Systems of negotiated order are characterized by situational coordination of interests, flexible definitions of desired end states, and spontaneous initiatives by interested stakeholders. We examine the development of the Linux community and its negotiated system of self‐governance, and offer three additional business examples that suggest how negotiated order may provide a platform for stakeholders to innovatively leverage the dynamics of the contemporary environment. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

'Conditions of Success' (COS) was organised to study the internationalisation of the construction industry in 1989. At that time few companies, and even fewer researchers, were interested in international construction endeavours. The purpose of the study was to collect information on activities of the 1980s in order to project who might be successful and under what conditions would they be successful in the next century. Extensive interviews were conducted with 60 participating firms from seven countries. While this group has now been reduced to about 20 via mergers and acquisitions they have demonstrated the value of several of the recommendations from the study. Critical to the study was an Executive Symposium held in Stockholm in 1991 where executives presented their view of the future and how best to prepare for it. Professor Ranko Bon, of Reading University, played a pivotal role in this special Symposium, as chair of the diverse interests and adviser to organising the results. Ten major recommendations are outlined in the paper. A critical distinction emerged from the study, which has grown in theoretical importance since 1991. It is between the North American, primarily Harvard-centric, strategic model for internationalisation and the relationship-building approach of Asia (initially Japanese and now Chinese). The Asian approach is closer to that of Europe and gaining in effectiveness and prominence over that of North America.Internationalisation, conditions, success, interdependence, value creation, construction activities, relationship building,

The concept of an open society is based on the idea that even with imperfect information and knowledge people can still act. We find this preferable to the more common presumption that leaders have special access to the truth and thus should lead. We instead look to the history of science to remind ourselves that, since no one is in possession of the actual truth, it seems better to at least distribute responsibility along with information so individuals can seek their own truths. Standing in the way of this are long‐standing traditions, such as the very important one found in higher education. This tradition is where the faculty, administration and accreditation authorities design curriculum structures for students and create learning environments for universities with a presumption that there is truth, that they know what it is, and that it is sufficiently fixed to be institutionalized. This idea of truth supports and exists within a relatively closed system, and assumes that the actors can also behave as if they are closed. Unfortunately, those that design and administer a university have the most to gain if they can keep the system fixed and closed, and those who are excluded from the management are those with the most to lose if the current managers are wrong. The current system operates with impunity. The administrative emphasis can be on finding and following educational standards that presume stability, not in creating learning environments that can accommodate change. This is consistent with the long‐accepted theory that there is a ‘hidden curriculum’ behind the explicit curriculum in higher education. It is set up to give strong messages about power, authority, control, obedience, hierarchy and related behaviors. Herein we are concerned with how this reflects upon our current and future society, and how we might experiment with alternative educational systems that can perform better. Within the pessimism there are significant opportunities for creative improvement, but to realize such innovation educational systems need to be able to enhance cooperation and realignment between different disciplines and stakeholders. It is widely accepted that a flexible, customized curriculum that can be dynamic and accept decision‐making involvement by students is desirable. Generally it gets rejected as being too expensive, requiring too much administration and ‘being unfair to students’. The tendency is to stay with the tradition of ‘standardized and controlled’ education. Major organizational changes will be needed within the formal university to be able to address alternative agendas. Accreditation activities could be instrumental in setting the stage for these. They could address the limits in maintaining barriers between various stakeholders, and impediments for change, the ignoring of quality management and the distress of those who have the most to lose from participation in a defective educational system. Accreditation activities should, on the other hand, foster and enhance developmental improvement ...

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