Of Hackers and Hairdressers
Special issue: Online Communities and Open Innovation: Governance and Symbolic Value Creation.
URL = http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=g792760006~db=all
Special issue of the journal Industry & Innovation, (Volume 15 Issue 2 2008)
Summary
“The paper by Langlois and Garzarelli, “Of Hackers and Hairdressers: Modularity and the Organizational Economics of Open-Source Collaboration”, is the first paper in this Special Issue and sets the stage for a discussion on governance in online communities, allowing us to tease out what are the important dimensions. In this mainly conceptual paper, the authors employ the empirical illustration of an open source online community to explore the generic question in organizational economics of how the division of intellectual labour is based on a trade-off between modularity (i.e. specialization) and the opportunity to integrate various individually developed components of knowledge. The paper claims that the trade-off allows the individuals populating the open source community to exchange efforts rather than products, under a regime in which the providers of code self-identify themselves as suppliers of products in a market, rather than employees in a firm. Through their discussion, Langlois and Garzarelli build a useful two-by-two matrix of product vs. efforts on one axis and self-identification of contributors vs. no self-identification on the other. In this matrix the firm, the market, outsourcing and voluntary production as it occurs in open source communities are situated and, hence, presented as different modes of innovation production.
This provokes a series of questions on how communities can be managed when the connection between incentives—that is, the voluntary basis upon which the community is built—and the particular dynamics of the organization of labour in an open community—exchanging effort and not product—is taken into account. Firms and communities have diverse and sometimes incommensurable goals (O’Mahony, 2003), and it is a challenge for firms to derive benefits from working with communities.