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The old adage," It's not what you know, but who you know," could, paradoxically, be the motto for the Information Age. We discuss the emergence of personal social networks as the main form of social organization in the workplace. A dazzling new battery of communication technologies enables workers to connect to diverse, far-flung social networks. The seemingly sudden appearance of people in restaurants talking into their cell phones, the smash success of the Palm products, the increasing use of instant messaging at the office, the chirp of pagers in meetings-all herald the intense moment-by-moment communication activity of workers plugging into their social networks. Castells described the network society in the large (Castells, 1996). We report our ethnographic study of the ways people wield their personal social networks to get things done at work. Our investigation provides a worm's eye view of the network society.

Much of what we hear and read in the popular media and from business school gurus describes new forms of workplace organization that presume robust institutional underpinnings. According to these accounts, technology and social change are working together to create wondrous new organizational configurations such as learning communities, quality circles, virtual teams, communities of practice. In contrast, our research on patterns of work in the information economy reveals a countervailing trend-the rise of personal social networks as a key social structure enabling work. Rather than being nurtured by institutionalized group structures, we found that workers are increasingly thrown back on their own individual resources …