George Dafermos published his Blogging the Market paper (PDF) on weblogs as a disruptive technology for organizations. Disruptive both in the diffusion of technology, but as cultural disruption, an embodiment of online self-organising social systems, are essentially characterised by management decentralisation and ultimately threaten to destabilise current organisational structures and re-invent the scope of management. On external blogging, he cluefully describes how letting go of control will make marketing departments gonzo, but when they do they will rediscover how to speak and listen. He discredits the two market theory, arguing that the internal market of employees needs to be able to participate in marketing. On internal blogging: The paper makes some of my favorite points on fostering Social Capital, transitioning from email and blogging as KM; arguing that prior to its management though, knowledge needs to be communicated and interviews Kevin Werbach: On internal blogging, I see it as less of a disruption to business culture. Most of the control issues have been dealt with before with email and IM, employees can already communnicate without bounaries, difference being the persistence and accessibility of conversations. And most importantly how a conversation can be given democratic credibility. Cultural disruptions end up being co-opted, as we see with managers being the greatest users of email today. In full disclosure my company seeks to provide these productivity benefits with a more graceful transition, but it also puts me in a position to work with weblogs (and other social software) in organizations. One way of describing how weblogs don't purely subvert the hierarchy is to distinguish between institutional and proceedural authority as referenced in the Phantom Authority paper on Wikipedia: The above applies to virtual communities, so to put differently for businesses, weblogs have the capability to enhance the influence of business practice and heterarchy, but business process and hierarchy will be governed by the traditional means of distributing power. Practice will become a greater source for promotion and incentive, but more importantly, enable organizations to change course and activities at speed based on what the organization knows.