Organisation is a technology choice. Whether it is political, social or economic organisation. Normally the most efficient form of organisation is chosen to serve a particular purpose. Capital intensive industries tend to adopt heavily centralised structures to support their operations. Commoditised industries can support decentralised structures.
The Navy is a good example of a capital intensive industry. A ship takes a lot of money to design, build, man and maintain. Consequently the Navy needs a massive operation to raise the revenues, to fund the process, and over look the process. Navies largely remain the monopoly of nation-states as they have the infrastructure to raise the money through tax to build and support the bureaucracy a Navy needs.
Publishing has become a commoditised industry. There are numerous competitors supplying both paper and digital publishing services and products. An example of this is SSR which is hosted in a basement but has the same web-presence as the New York Times (but not the same audience).
An organisation that wants to compete in the publishing industry has to have a decentralised structure in order to avoid the high overhead of a centralised bureaucratic structure. Centralisation in a commoditised industry makes the organisational form inefficient.
Government is an organisational form which has to respond to pressures in order to maximise its efficiency. The early 20thC was a capital intensive environment. Warfare was capital intensive and between states. Then there was the rise of the welfare state where governments adopted many of the services that private industry had (or had not) provided. This type of system makes sense to have a supporting centralised organisation.
In the last twenty years out-sourcing has become more common. Many of the technologies that led to nation-state monopolies for capital reasons have commoditised to the point that non-state actors can afford them.
A good example of this is UAVs. Once the domain of nation-states, they have become affordable for private owners in the short space of twenty years. An Australian test recently had a garage built UAV fly from Canada to England, through storms and rain, to land a 5kg payload within five metres of its target in England. That type of precision had been a capital intensive pursuit in the past - not anymore.
In a commoditised environment the government needs to adopt flatter or decentralised structures otherwise they are adding inefficiencies into the system.
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