Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 16

Michael Stevenson

How can we make sense of cultures of peer production, which exist in diverse national, cultural, and language contexts, span several industries and domains, and comprise a range of different organizational structures? To set the groundwork for such an understanding, this chapter argues that it is necessary to see that peer production is, by and large, a form of cultural production, and thus bears structural similarities to existing cultural fields like art, literature, and journalism. The chapter shows how (1) peer‐production projects are clearly embedded in existing cultural fields, and often represent an autonomous form of production that seeks to resist certain economic and political pressures in favor of core values such as meritocracy and openness and (2) such autonomy is achieved through the enactment of those core values, which are in turn related to the social hierarchies, forms of exclusion, and other limitations that characterize these projects and the groups of people who populate them.