Paul Graham, author and programmer, talks about what businesses can learn from blogging and open source software:

So these, I think, are the three big lessons open source and blogging have to teach business: (1) that people work harder on stuff they like, (2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and (3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down.

None of this is new, but he has quite a few good personal examples. His concluding paragraph recommends,

That may be the greatest effect, in the long run, of the forces underlying open source and blogging: finally ditching the old paternalistic employer-employee relationship, and replacing it with a purely economic one, between equals.

From the relational models perspective of Alan Fiske, what Graham is saying is that people are more productive when in an equality matching model than in an authority ranking model.

Question: I wonder about Graham's claim: Might an authority ranking model be more productive in some contexts? Which?