One thing I think and write about here is “how startups work” (how they hire, promote, manage, launch, fundraise, etc.) as a subject of scholarly work (describe the patterns, demonstrate with evidence, critically evaluate).
Here is a teardown of how societies work:
Community unity size (Dunbar’s number 150), hierarchy ratios (span of control of 7), and sophistication of institutions in different organizational forms (i.e. Democratic bureaucracies do more work than Authoritarian ones, e.g. Assimilating the diverse attitudes of the people vs just insisting on a structure, cf Luttwak and How Nations Fail).
Much of modern state structure is a product of mass media.
In the Networked age (see also The Seventh Sense by Joshua Cooper Ramo), perhaps this changes — e.g. Estonia or Scotland like the EU but keep their local governance separate but linked.
So: how about companies? How do they work now and will they also get smaller?
Surely we think entrepreneurship trends show how smaller teams can accomplish a lot — the Singapores and Estonias of commerce.
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