ABSTRACT
As businesses become more adaptable and flexible in response to shifting demands and opportunities in their globalizing markets, traditional understandings of organizational structure are breaking down. At first, this breakdown was described in terms of the organization chart; relationships were too multidimensional to be represented by drawing them in a two-dimensional frame, or they changed so frequently that making a chart seemed pointless. When old structural notions collapsed further, this change was communicated with terms such as outsourcing, delayering, de-differentiation and re-engineering. Now, concepts such as networks and virtual organizations are challenging traditional notions of organization itself. However, like a collapsing star that forms a black hole, the collapsing notion of organizational structure does not disappear. Its absence is felt as an empty space that attracts. For instance, some organization members speak of a frustrating and perpetual lack of communication and coordination and a commensurate loss of control and identity; they may even become nostalgic and personify their emptiness as the ‘absent leader’. Others experience empty space as freedom to create something new.
