Invited Talk: Software, Markets, and the Future of Work

Is combination of computer networking, social computing and virtual markets undermining the stability of the corporation and thereby, radically changing the nature of work? Certainly, these technologies have facilitated outsourcing, the movement of jobs from one market to another. Since roughly 2008, they seem to have been reshaping the nature of the corporation and thereby creating new kinds of jobs. This talk argues that these technologies are undermining a key assumption about the corporation, the idea that corporations were able to provide stable work and stable classes of jobs because they minimized certain costs of operating within a market. This idea is usually known as the Coase Thesis, after economist Ronald Coase. For nearly 80 years, the Coase Thesis been one of the foundations of the corporation and has suggested that corporations are an institution that can provide stable work to the labor force. As social computing has become more prevalent, computer networks and software have provided other ways of minimizing market costs. As a result, we may be moving into a period in which the traditional corporation can no longer be considered a stable providers of jobs. Instead, stable jobs may be provided in other ways by other kinds of organizations.