# Mass Collaboration and Learning: Opportunities, Challenges, and Influential Factors
## 4 Analysis of Affecting Factors
### Organizational Structures
#### 4.1.2 Organizational Structure and Mass Collaboration  
There are vast amounts of literature on organizational structures in various contexts. For instance, [19] discussed the importance of organizational structure for collaboration between sales and marketing, [20] assessed the influence of the technological knowledge base on the organizational structure, and virtual collaboration in a matrix organization was discussed by [21]. In the past, the structures of organizations or communities were mostly designed for effectiveness and efficiency although they are nowadays designed for agility, speed, and adaptability to be able to compete and win in today's global competitive environments. As organizations or communities are becoming more and more digital-based and there is a transformation towards performing projects collaboratively, they are also facing with an imperative to redesign their structures in order to learn more rapidly, move faster, quickly respond to demands, and adapt to the characteristics of new workforces and workplaces. While the business environment, customer needs, technology capabilities, and the nature of work in organizations and communities are likely to change, the organizational structure needs to reshape as well in a deliberate and strategic way. In this way, the design of structures for adaptability is a shift away from traditional organizational structures such as, hierarchical, centralized, and bureaucratic models towards unconventional models where projects are fulfilled collectively by networking a variety of self-directed participants [22]. However, thus far there have been very few attempts to report on the role of organizational structures in the context of mass collaboration and learning. Furthermore, there is no clear evidence in the literature that shows how mass collaborative projects can define, design, implement, and develop appropriate structures. Nevertheless, we may gain some insight on what kinds of organizational structures have more chances for adoption in mass collaborative learning projects if we review the structures used in a closer area. For this purpose, the taxonomy presented in [23] was chosen as it can fit the type of structures that are applied by various virtual communities in the collected papers. As depicted in Table 4, two main forms of structures in networks--collaborative networked organizations and ad-hoc collaboration forms--can be found at the root of this taxonomy. Taking into account this taxonomy, an analysis of the collected papers shows that the issue of organizational structure is addressed to some extent in 32 of them. The majority of these (88%) consider some form of collaborative networked organization, and the rest (12%) ad-hoc collaboration. Among the long-term strategic network structures, the PVC was the most applied form (19%) whereas business ecosystem was the least-mentioned one (3%). Regarding goal-oriented networks, virtual team had the highest percentage of occurrence (22%) among all introduced structures. In ad-hoc collaboration, the most mentioned structure is mass collaboration (9%). It is remarkable that the type of organizational structure which was applied in three articles in collected papers falls between the VBE and PVC categories in the above taxonomy (a kind of hybrid model). The types and percentage