Organization Studies 2015, Vol. 36(4) 445–471 © The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0170840614561566 www.egosnet.org/os Community and Innovation: From Tönnies to Marx Paul S. Adler University of Southern California, USA Abstract The idea of community has lurked in various forms in organization studies since the field’s inception, but its recent prominence as a critical precondition for innovation makes urgent the resolution of two theoretical puzzles. Both puzzles can be stated in the terms suggested by Tönnies’ classic contrast of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, community and association. First, it is difficult to reconcile the idea that community is critical to innovation with the traditionalistic character of Gemeinschaft. Second, it is difficult to reconcile any idea of community in work organizations with the conflictual character of the capitalist employment relation and the instrumental Gesellschaft character of the economic sphere. I argue that the resolution of the second puzzle via Marxist theory leads us to a resolution of the first. My thesis, in summary, is that community is a critical component of the capitalist labour-process, and that where this labour-process is oriented toward innovation, community is taking an historically new form. This new form represents a dialectical synthesis of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, a form we can call Genossenschaft, or collaborative. The argument is essentially theoretical; I illustrate some key features of this emergent collaborative form with case data from a software services firm. In conclusion I suggest that this new form represents communism developing in the heart of capitalism. Keywords innovation, knowledge work, organizational forms, topics Introduction Although the word itself appears only occasionally in organization studies, community has been an enduring preoccupation in our field. Community – which we can define provisionally as a social collectivity bound by a common identity, values, and norms – was already implicated (on a small scale) in Frederick Taylor’s arguments about work-teams’ tendency to ‘soldier’ (Taylor, 1972) and (on a larger scale) in the Hawthorne study’s analysis of social networks among shop-floor workers (Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939). Since then, community has been, I submit, the common core underlying concepts such as informal organization, intra- and inter-organizational networks, organic organizational form, organizational culture, social capital, clans, and industrial districts. Corresponding author: Paul S. Adler, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Bridge Hall 306, Los Angeles, CA 90089- 0808, USA. Email: padler@usc.edu 561566OSS 0 0 10.1177/0170840614561566Organization StudiesAdler research-article 2015 Special Themed Section on Marxist Studies of Organization by guest on April 13, 2015 oss.sagepub.com Downloaded from