Governance in online communities of artistic cultural production

Thesis (D.B.A.)--Boston UniversityWhile scholars have brought much insight into the governance of online communities engaged in the production of goods with relatively established quality criteria, such as open source software, they paid less attention to the governance of online communities of artistic cultural production. In artistic cultural production, due to its drive for novelty and potential resistance to institutionalized norms, it is difficult to create agreements and shared routines among participants -particularly during initial emergence when participants are new to one another and new to their form of contributions. In this two-essay dissertation, I study arguably the largest online community of artistic production in Turkey, Sour Dictionary, and analyze the governance configurations during its initial emergence and ongoing growth. The first essay describes how coherence was achieved during the birth and early years of the Dictionary through the use of ambiguity in the two governance dimensions of vision and rules of production. I show that in this period, ambiguity was maintained in these dimensions not only to provide participants with the flexibility they needed for artistic expressions, but also to bring clarity to the recognition of participants' allegiances. The presence of a shared opposition among participants appears key to achieving coherence in an artistic community, and for such a community, ambiguity is an adaptive resource rather than something to eliminate as is often argued within an economic logic. The second essay follows a natural experiment where the founder's changing decisions on two other governance dimensions of quality assurance and member recruitment, along with his utilizations of IT for growth, resulted in different outcomes of coherence and popularity during the community's ongoing growth. As the founder switched the combination of his use of IT and member recruitment method from one that invited slow and incremental growth to one that brought sudden and massive growth, the community faced a variety of problems in both outcomes. I show that these problems arose as the founder responded to growth by implementing quality assurance methods that emphasized efficiency rather than flexibility, and thus failed to