Social Structure and Mechanisms of Collective Production: Evidence from Wikipedia

In my dissertation I propose three counterintuitive social mechanisms to alleviate the risk that collective production will fail to maintain participant involvement and respond to demand. My first study, based on a panel dataset of edits and views of articles in the English Wikipedia, shows that, although collective production lacks a price-like mechanism to estimate demand for the goods it produces, consumers’ contributions act as such a signal to expert producers. In the second paper I examine the theory that collective production participation is greatest when social norms of collaboration are obeyed. Using a large panel dataset of production networks and normrelated behavior in Wikipedia, I show that social norm infringement is not completely detrimental to participation because norm enforcement increases the likelihood that the beneficiary producer continues participating. In my third paper, I rely on interviews with experienced Wikipedia producers to examine whether producers’ ties to non-participants in collective production increase the likelihood of turnover, and whether producers’ embeddedness in collective production reduces turnover risk. Surprisingly, I find that producers with networks rich in ties to non-producers and with a task-oriented approach to collective production are those least likely to stop participating

Handbook of Qualitative Organizational Research

Qualitative research has been heralded for contributing novel insights and theoretical perspectives to the management and organization literature (Eisenhardt, 1989; Pratt, 2009; Van Maanen, 1979, 1998; Whetten, 1989). The processes used by qualitative researchers to achieve these outcomes are often invisible to the reader, yet a set of principled, systematic approaches underlies the practices followed by qualitative researchers. In this chapter we illuminate a sampling technique that has been employed in recent works but has yet to be delineated as a methodology: structural sampling

Walking on the dark side of the moon. A day in the life of DEI manager

In recent years (especially after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020), companies have stepped up their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) awareness and practices. We see more and more job openings for DEI managers. When we talk to DEI professionals, we see that the DEI team has often moved from a voluntary entity to an integral part of the organigram – with KPIs, strategy, budget and paid workload for its members. At the same time, in the wake of new economic crises, we read more and more in the news of DEI functions being reduced or axed altogether. Earlier in 2023, Ellen McGirt reported on the findings from Revelio Labs that “a 33% churn rate for DEI-related roles at more than 600 companies engaged in layoffs, compared to 21% for non-DEI roles”. No wonder then that on 15 May 2023, when we met 22 members of the Diversity Managers Association of Belgium (DMAB), from 20 companies across over 12 different sectors (from public transport and finance to distribution and pharma, including DEI managers for non-profits) on our Brussels campus, to talk about the wellbeing and career sustainability of the DEI manager, naming the workshop “the dark side of the moon” turned out to be very appropriate. Most DEI professionals are doing what they do because there is a personal story fuelling the passion. Often enough, they have the experience of ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ - either relating to themselves or their family. Which means that what we do is not a job; it has real stakes. On the bright side, this brings passion and resilience. On the dark side, it brings disappointment when change is slow, pain when you can’t make the difference you set out to make, and guilt when you are too tired to carry on. Social justice is not an empty noun. It is personal. With this white paper we invite you to take a walk on the ‘dark side’ of DEI implementation challenges, and explore together with us the challenges of such projects, and identify specific actions that DEI managers and organisations can take to address the complexities of DEI strategy execution

Testing Coleman’s Social Norm Enforcement Mechanism: Evidence from Wikipedia

Since Durkheim, sociologists have believed that actors in dense network structures experience fewer norm violations. Coleman proposed one explanatory mechanism, arguing that dense networks provide an opportunity structure to reward those who punish norm violators, leading to more frequent punishment and in turn fewer norm violations. Despite ubiquitous scholarly references to Coleman’s theory, little empirical work has directly tested it in large-scale natural settings with longitudinal data. The authors undertake such a test using records of norm violations during the editing process on Wikipedia, the largest user-generated online encyclopedia. These data allow them to track all three elements required to test Coleman’s mechanism: norm violations, punishments for such violations, and rewards for those who punish violations. The results support Coleman’s mechanism

Guest Editorial for ‘Management and the Future of Open Collaboration’

Open collaboration gained prominence as a practice with the advent of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities in the 1980s. Since then, technological advances have enabled individuals, firms and communities to implement applications relying on large-scale, open collaboration. Open collaboration research is a field of rapid growth in organizational theory and innovation. Initial work in this area has focused on the management and governance of FOSS projects as well as on a wide range of user communities in fields as different as sports, scientific equipment users and manufacturers, library information systems, computer games, and medical equipment. Another research stream has focused on open innovation from a corporate perspective, studying the ways in which traditional organizations can harness the power of communities to innovate, or on the creation of 'boundary' or 'hybrid' organizations that facilitate collaboration between open-source communities and firms. Yet another stream has examined open collaboration platforms, particularly the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, assessing participation processes and collaboration outcomes in this particular setting. Finally a more critical stream of research has characterized open collaboration both negatively, as ‘prosumption’ in which labor is transferred from workers to consumers, thereby generating new means of exploitation; or positively, as the ‘germ form’ of a post-capitalist society where exchange value will disappear altogether.

Collateral damage: The relationship between high-salience events and variation in racial discrimination

To what extent are individual or organizational biases affected by racially salient events? We propose that acts of discrimination and the individual biases that undergird them are sensitive to high-salience events and will oscillate with the salience of the focal attribute. In short, that the propensity to discriminate reflects both individual and environmental differences, and therefore a given person may become more prone to discriminate in the aftermath of a high-salience event. We test our hypothesis in three online experiments that examine how varying the salience of race affects the evaluation of in-group or out-group founders. We find that respondents evaluate their in-group members more favorably, and out-group members less favorably, when exposed to a high-salience event, which translates into a significant disadvantage for the minority (African American) group. We complement these studies with an assessment of how police shootings affect fundraising outcomes on Kickstarter to confirm the external validity of our findings. Together, these studies indicate that racially salient events depress the quality evaluations and success odds of African American entrepreneurs relative to others. Hence, discrimination levels can be affected by salient yet unrelated events, and such events are consequential for the economic fortunes of individuals belonging to minority and disadvantaged groups.The authors thank audiences at the West Coast Research Symposium and Academy of Management conferences for their helpful feedback on early versions of this project. Over the years, the authors bounced this idea off all manner of colleagues: Keyvan Kashkooli, Ming Leung, Andrew Nelson, Samer Srivastava, and many others offered helpful advice. They also thank the very patient and encouraging editors and reviewers of this special issue, who helped guide the paper to its present state

Why middle managers struggle to implement DEI strategies

To successfully achieve DEI change, organizational leaders must understand the implementation challenges faced by middle managers and incorporate their specific needs into policy development. The authors identify two key tensions faced by middle managers — the autonomy vs. control tension, and the short-term vs. long-term tension — and offer strategies for leaders to help middle managers navigate them

Making space for emotions: Empathy, contagion, and legitimacy’s double-edged sword

Legitimacy is critical to the formation and expansion of nascent fields because it lends credibility and recognizability to once overlooked actors and practices. At the same time, legitimacy can be a double-edged sword precisely because it facilitates field growth, attracting actors with discrepant practices that may lead to factionalization and undermine the coherence of the field’s collective identity. In this paper, we investigate how organizations can mitigate the downside of legitimation by eliciting emotions that align increasingly discrepant actors and celebrate an inclusive collective identity. We leverage fieldwork and computational text analysis to examine the relationship between legitimation, collective identity coherence, and emotions in the context of the Makers, a nascent field of do-it-yourself hobbyists and technology hackers. In our quantitative analysis we show that legitimation was associated with increased field heterogeneity, but that collective events countered the diluting effects of legitimation. In the qualitative analysis of our interview data we demonstrate that activities at these events—demonstrations and hands-on experiences—elicited emotional contagion and empathy among actors. These emotions reconciled tensions among increasingly heterogeneous actors and bolstered the coherence of the Maker collective identity. We conclude by discussing our contribution to research on legitimacy, collective identity, and field-configuring events.The authors gratefully acknowledge the suggestions and contributions provided by Sonali K. Shah, Heather Haveman, Jo-Ellen Pozner, Sarah Kaplan, and three anonymous reviewers, as well as participants in departmental research groups and conference talks such as the American Sociological Association, European Group for Organizational Studies, and Academy of Management annual conferences. They also thank the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and Github for computing resources that supported this project