Distribution networks as a culture of collaboration

Culture is an emergent property of human systems. It differentiates humans from other animals because it describes how humans ‘make themselves’ through symbolism. Humans, unlike other creatures, create complex identities through symbols, knowledge, information and communication or ‘discourse’. Culture enables humans to construct a reality for themselves and, as such, humans prescribe their environment, their ‘self ’ and others through symbolism. Culture, therefore is suitably conceived of as a network of ideas. Understanding of these ideas requires emphasis upon their pattern (or form) of their organisation, which involves the qualitative configuration of relationships of ideas. These relational patterns are non-material and non-physical processes, and therefore, not appropriate for structural analysis. Culture and networks are, consequently, coalescent constructs. They both concern nonphysical organisation. Culture is a human network of ideas and human networks are cultural because they prescribe their own existence through symbolic ideas. Both constructs require an epistemic consciousness wherein epistemology has no essential, structural foundations. Network thinking or vernetztes Denken recognises that reality and our descriptions of it are a network of relationships. Objective understanding is, therefore, a fallacy because we cannot abstractly separate from this reality and our description of it because we are a part of it and it is a part of us. However, both network and cultural theory have been inclined to avoid this necessary ontological nominalism. They have been inclined to adopt the foundationalist premises of scientism in, consciously or not, often accepting the validity of nomotheic variance modelling and positivist epistemology. This paper outlines a subjectivist alternative, which promises to treat networks and culture as unreal inventions of human imagination. The implications for research in applying an ‘epistemic consciousness’ approach are outlined. INTRODUCTION Fritjof Capra regards “networks as the general pattern of life” (Capra 1996:153). In other words networks are the organisational form of all living systems. Central to Capra's (1996) thesis is a non-mechanistic, post-Cartesian and ‘cultural’ conception of living systems that requires a postmodern understanding of networks. This is absent from most business-to-business research, which is predominantly modernist in nature (Gómez Arias and Acebrón, 2001). This paper argues that network theory needs to adopt a postmodern conception, which takes culture seriously.