Managing Boundaries between Organizations and Communities

* Paper: Managing Boundaries between Organizations and Communities: Comparing Creative Commons and Wikimedia. Paper prepared for the 3rd Free Culture Research Conference, October 8-9, 2010, Berlin. By Leonhard Dobusch and Sigrid Quack.

URL = http://wikis.fu-berlin.de/download/attachments/59080767/Dobusch-Quack-Paper.pdf

The general question we are addressing is: How do organizations in digital information economy manage the boundaries to related focal communities?

Abstract

Introduction

"In this paper we investigate the dialectical relation between informal communities and related formal organizations by looking at Wikimedia and Creative Commons. While delivering their services with the help of related communities of volunteers from the very start, both organizations struggle with dynamics of community development and governance in general and with the management of boundaries between organization and community in particular. In our comparative longitudinal case analysis we contrast attempts of coping with these challenges via partial outsourcing (Creative Commons) and via partial integration (Wikimedia) respectively. Thereby we show why the pragmatist concept of “corrigible provisionality” might be a promising approach for capturing the practices dominating boundary management between organizations and related communities."

Excerpts

"Borders of market and non-market modes of production coevolve, leading to cooperation and conflict between (for-profit) business and (non-profit) civil society organizations in the production of all kinds of cultural goods.

For both types of organizations alike, this leads to new challenges for the management of their respective organizational environment in general and related communities of consumers, users or even contributors in particular; this holds independent of whether these communities are effectively delivering the content of new knowledge services as is the case in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia or the photo-platform Flickr, or whether these are „merely‟ contributing with feedback to the marketability of products and services. Both online and offline, organizations increasingly face the non-trivial task of mobilizing communities of practice (Wenger 1998), whose members mostly do not belong to the organization itself. This integration of user and practice communities in the core processes of good and service provision seriously blurs the boundary between organization and environment, making its management via specialized “boundary spanning units” (xxx) difficult at best, obsolete at worst.

...

Especially organizations, which strive as “market rebels” (Rao 2009) to alter established norms, taken-.for-granted assumptions and market structures, regularly rely on (the resources of) communities of consumers, users or practice; facilitating such communities poses challenges similar to those of managing volunteers (Lofland 2006) and is of utmost importance for the social-movement-like struggles of those organizations, be they non-profit or for-profit. Following King and Pearce (2010), such community-based attempts of creating or changing market institutions work via influencing corporate strategies, participating in private regulatory endeavours and/or the creation of new actor categories within globalizing economic fields."

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(Researchers) "share a reluctance to investigate the relationship between communities and related formal organizations (Mayntz 2008; for a notable exception see O‟Mahoney and Bechky 2008) in processes of mobilization and coordination. Group structures and dynamics of communities are typically characterised as informal and portrayed as stark contrast to classic organizational bureaucracies (see, for example, Hemetsberger and Reinhardt 2009). But while hardly any of the different phenomena subsumed under the umbrella of diverse community concepts above evolves completely detached from related formal organizational bodies, digital communities in particular rely on commercial (e.g. Canonical in the case of Ubuntu Linux) or non-profit (e.g. Wikimedia Foundation in the Wikipedia case) carrier organizations or “platforms” (Elkin-Koren 2009b).

In spite of its relevance, formal organizing is not identical to the organizational features and dynamics of its respective communities. In spite of partial overlaps, we conceptualize communities as being part of an organization‟s enivornment, the borders being continually and reciprocally re-produced and re-shaped by the actors involved (Giddens 1984). In this regard, formal organizing may (strategically) irritate, influence, foster, guide and control community development but it is not community development itself. This is similar to the relationship between a social movement and related social movement organizations (see, for example, Della Porta and Diani‟s 2006). Existing typologies of these or similar civil society organizations however rarely cover organizational fluidity and change rooted in reciprocal interactions of community and organization (e.g. Salomon und Anheier 1996; Anheier und Themudo 2005a, 2005b). Similarly, the efficacy of organizations in giving orientation, direction and voice to diffuse communities in their attempts of challenging institutions is understudied (Mayntz 2008; for an exception see O‟Mahoney and Bechky 2008). Both these shortcomings are even more salient for the case of organizations, whose transnational scope of activities require addressing heterogeneity of community members rooted in national and local diversity. Therefore, the general question we are addressing is: How do organizations in digital information economy manage the boundaries to related focal communities?

...

We compare two prominent examples of transnational non-profit franchising: In the case of Creative Commons an organizational network around a focal non-profit NGO develops and propagates a set of alternative copyright licenses. Founded in 2002, Creative Commons managed to port its licenses into 50 local jurisdictions with the help of over 70 affiliate organizations within no more than 6 years (Dobusch and Quack 2010). As Creative Commons licenses can be applied to all kinds of copyrightable material – from audio and video to educational and scientific works – Creative Commons has to deal with (demands of) a fast growing and highly diverse community of license users. The second case we are investigating is Wikimedia, which has been created as a formal organization to support the communities behind Wikipedia and its related sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikinews or Wikibooks.2 While having been established as a US-based foundation in 2003, it officially recognizes 21 local “Wikimedia chapter” organizations by the end of 2008. These Wikimedia chapters have all been newly set up and are legally and financially autonomous.

In both cases the formal organization provides a regulatory framework, within which communities of contributors create (a commons of) digital goods and services. This, together with further similarities of Creative Commons and Wikimedia in terms of founding date (2002 and 2003 respectively), place (US) and organizational form (non-profit franchise network) as well as in terms of central mission (community building and development), allows focusing three theoretically interesting differences in terms of (1) organizational structure, (2) organization-community relation and (3) transnationalization process."

More Information

Author's blog at http://governancexborders.wordpress.com