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Rules and social norms play an important part in organizing peer production. Given the anonymity, ease of entry, and limited social cues which characterize peer projects, this can be a challenging mission (Resnick & Kraut, 2011). In that respect, institutions can be seen as an answer to the question of “how to steer the integration of dispersed knowledge resources and how to coordinate such activities to the purpose of creating common value” (Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015, p. 1650). They provide for the collective capability of participants separated in space and time to bundle together the piecemeal contributions and direct them towards the joint production of a valuable outcome. In order to continuously create and ensure collective agency, rules and social norms can rarely be one‐time solutions. They have to be adapted to the dynamics of a particular project, for instance, in terms of new user cohorts, content growth, or a changing technological and legal environment.

Scott (2001) defines institutions as “multifaceted, durable, social structures, made up of symbolic elements, social activities, and material resources” (p. 49). Institutions are created because of “the development, recognition, and naming of a recurrent problem to which no existing institution provides a satisfactory repertoire of responses” (Scott, 2001, p. 96). In peer production institutions take the shape of formal regulations, informal social norms, as well as shared actions and evaluations. Furthermore, institutions are encoded requirements and courses of activity embedded in software and hardware (de Laat, 2007; Markus, 2007; O’Mahony & Ferraro, 2007; Schroeder & Wagner, 2012). The institutional ecology of cooperation is established in order to protect the integrity of projects.

Most notably, the idea of freedom is enshrined in licenses such as the General Public License or the Creative Commons License (Lakhani & von Hippel, 2003; Lessig, 1999; Raymond, 1999; Stewart & Gosain, 2006; Vieira & de Filippi, 2014; see also Dulong de Rosnay, this volume). In projects such as the Linux kernel operating system, they guarantee some of the pivots of peer production and safeguard its essential modes of operation that rest on sharing, copying, adapting, and disseminating incremental contributions. This backbone is charged with a normative impetus, namely, that proprietary software “is antisocial, that it is unethical, that it is simply wrong,” as Richard Stallman (2004) exclaimed. This again rests on the moral idea of a hacker culture where all information should be free and decentralization ought to be promoted so as to change life for the better (Levy, 1984).

Institutions are an ill‐defined category. Following Scott (2001) we can distinguish “three pillars of institutions” (p. 51). They encompass regulations, norms, as well as conventional orders of knowledge and action (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991). Regulative rules come as provisions, statutes, laws or decrees that specify how an activity must be executed. They imply monitoring and enforcement through sanctions or gratifications that either penalize deviant behavior or reward compliance. In peer production projects, rules are vital resources to draw on in order to justify as well as to challenge a decision or action (Bryant, Forte, & Bruckman, 2005; Lakhani & Von Hippel, 2003; Pentzold, 2017, 2018; Viègas, Wattenberg, & Dave, 2004; Viègas, Wattenberg, & McKeon, 2007). Rules crystallize informal conventions or implicit standards in tangible written form and prompt what Giddens (1984) has called an instrumental behavior. It can mean conformity, yet other responses such as prevention, defiance, or forms of gaming the system might also pose viable options.

The application of formal regulations can be backed up by normative demands. Norms can be seen, according to Scott (2001), as “conceptions of the preferred or the desirable, together with the construction of standards of which existing structures or behavior can be compared and assessed” (p. 54f.). They usually take shape in maxims, sayings, or moral doctrines like the dictum that “All information should be free,” as documented by Levy (1984, p. 40) in his account of the hacker ethic. Because peer production projects only have a limited potential to enforce rules or prosecute wrongdoers due to their voluntary and open nature, they very much rely on informal norms (Raymond, 1999; Stewart & Gosain, 2006). Norms ideally do not need external sanctions because they encompass an obligatory moral request that takes effect by way of internalized commitment. In Max Weber’s (1978) terms, norms feature the “prestige of being considered binding, or, as it may be expressed, of ‘legitimacy’” (p. 31). Thus, while rules request an instrumental logic of individual interests and alternative ways to act, some of which are permitted while others are not, norms engender a logic of acceptability that is oriented towards an accordance of action and expectations (March & Olsen, 1989).

Both rules and norms rest on collective forms of knowledge and shared mindsets which endow them with sense and meaning. These cultural frameworks of wider belief systems as well as repetitive patterns of action often remain tacit. As such, they “not only constrain options: they establish the very criteria by which people discover their preferences” (DiMaggio and Powell, 1991, p. 11). Similarly, Hall and Taylor (1996) suggested that “institutions influence behavior not simply by specifying what one should do but also by specifying what one can imagine oneself doing in a given context” (p. 948). This horizon of thought and agency cannot be reflected upon as a whole. The “way we do things” escapes instrumental efforts to efface, add, or change particular elements as it unfurls in long‐term processes of habitualization. This happens, as Berger and Luckmann (1966) stated, when an action is repeatedly performed. It becomes instituted as an expected pattern which is reproduced in further activity and as such then becomes the matter of codification, instruction, and reinforcement. The Code of Conduct adopted by the Debian project in 2014 demonstrates this dynamic. It sets down a number of basic principles. For instance, it includes the request to be respectful, cooperative, and concise.

As a social imaginary, suggests Charles Taylor (2002), basic normative understandings are “not a set of ideas; rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society” (p. 91). Compliance does, therefore, occur because other kinds of thinking or acting are quite inconceivable (Scott, 2001; Zucker, 1977). Consequently, even when peer production projects do not feature a written code of conduct, accepted contributions will still follow an implicit cultural code. With a distinction made by John Searle (1997) we can say that work in peer production might, at times, not be guided by regulatory rules of commands and interdictions, but they are anchored by constitutive rules of sensemaking and evaluation.

The three institutional pillars can only be separated for analytical purposes. In practice, they are entangled: prescriptive rules go along with normative creeds which again only make sense against a background of taken‐for‐granted understandings. In peer production, institutions define what are considered to be correct forms of participation. They justify different positions among contributors and their stratified rights and obligations to execute decisions. They also establish authority among the stratified project participants and they account for their license to employ or manipulate technological levers.

It is important to note that the software and hardware of peer production enclose an institutional dimension sui generis (Lessig, 1999). As virtually all projects rest on a technological infrastructure, design implications are essential instruments that configure the agency of contributors. The programs and algorithmic procedures set down in code are used in order to materialize regulations and social norms by way of organizing access to technical features as well as to the programming facilities themselves (Kesan & Shah, 2005).

Studying the institutional conditions in Wikipedia, Butler, Joyce, and Pike (2008) distinguished a set of perspectives among editors. One way of defining institutions was as rational efforts to achieve consistent and reliable decisions and to codify role positions and duties. From a different perspective, they were taken to represent evolving, competing entities which propagated themselves: rules generate more rules. Another view accentuated the construction of meaning and identity that defines the character and ambition of the project. Institutions were furthermore framed as external signals that indicated to audiences or users not actively participating that the project attends to problems, and finds ways to address them. They were also regarded as being internal signals that raise awareness for topics or perspectives and draw boundaries of a project’s inside and outside. Wikipedia’s set of rules, norms, and basic understandings was specified in terms of negotiated settlements and trophies that mark the end of conflict, or to signal binding consensus. Finally, institutions also served as control mechanisms set in place to ensure appropriate action.

Overall, institutions in peer production help to order the dispersed engagement of volunteers and to bring together meaningful, valuable outcomes. They should facilitate, not suppress productive engagement. In open projects with unsolicited membership and the constant exit option, we often find a plastic interpretation of institutions, not a strict enforcement though there are also institutionalized forms of sanctioning and ostracizing users. The flexible handling of rules and social norms pertains to the interests and agendas of the users involved. Hence, institutions in peer production are sites of conflict and specification and thus form part of editorial power plays (Kriplean et al., 2007). Besides, they are a matter of socialization and instruction (Viègas et al., 2007). In this regard, Gabriella Coleman (2013) referred to an “ethical enculturation” (p. 124) she encountered among the contributors to the free and open source software project Debian. In order to stay relevant and mirror the requirements and concerns of the users, the institutions had to be actively practiced and passed on to incoming participants.