Epistemology of Organizations in an Age of Complexity: Firms, Open Networks, and AI

As the global economy grows more complex, dynamic, and uncertain, the epistemic fitness of organizational forms—how they sense, validate, decide, and learn—becomes central to innovation capacity and long-term performance. This essay outlines a research program to develop a comparative framework for the epistemology of organizations. It contrasts centralized firms (pre- and post-digital) with open networks (peer-to-peer) and explores the transformative potential of hybrid AI–P2P epistemic models. Grounded in established literature from Coase and Williamson to Benkler and modern complexity theorists, this work situates its urgency in the context of rising systemic turbulence. The central argument is that in an era defined by uncertainty and complexity, the competitive advantage shifts from efficiencies of scale to efficiencies of learning, anticipation and coherent joint action, making organizational epistemology the critical determinant of future economic dominance.