Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 91

The chapter synthesizes existing research to produce a framework for understanding cultures of peer production. I argue that the cultures of peer production projects will tend to be characterized by autonomy, meritocracy, openness, and inspiration, with each of these concepts corresponding to one of the following sections. In Section 3, I discuss the autonomy of peer production projects and their position within larger fields of software and media production, or what might be described as a larger field of “tech” or the field of new media production (Stevenson, 2016). The distinction of peer production projects is closely related to core values and assumptions, in particular meritocracy, and Section 4 examines this value and the cultural practices associated with it. Section 5 discusses openness as a key value and disposition within peer production cultures, elaborating on this with examples such as Wikipedia’s “good faith collaboration” (Reagle, 2012). Section 6 asks what kind of moral “order of worth” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) justifies commitment to peer production projects, and argues that we should especially consider the role of inspiration and the importance of the affective dimension of contributing to these projects.

In this introduction to the cultures of peer production, I have made various decisions that should be noted. First, this chapter draws its framework largely from Bourdieu’s field theory (1993) and Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of critique (2006). In addition to the fact that a number of other sociological theories have been used to make sense of cultures of peer production, it should be noted that the theories I have chosen contain significantly different assumptions: critics argue that Bourdieu’s theory does not account for the agency of individuals, something that Boltanski and Thévenot specifically aim to address by arguing that individuals reflect on their actions and seek to justify them through appeals to various kinds of valuation, or “orders of worth” (see, e.g., O’Neil, 2011 for a discussion of this difference). Despite this internal inconsistency, I have chosen this combination as it helps to highlight (1) the relational forms of structure that give meaning to peer production projects and actions within them, for example through oppositions that actors draw between autonomy and commercial or political influence, and (2) how participants justify their commitment to these projects and specific actions within them. Second, although some definitions of peer production include entities such as Google’s search engine (which analyzes the hyperlinks produced by a decentralized group of actors in order to produce better search results), this chapter draws on a specific subset of commons‐based peer production based on intentional collective action, specifically Wikipedia and free and open source software (FOSS) production. In addition to their intentional nature, in Bourdieu’s terminology I am limiting my examples to “autonomous” examples of peer production, at the expense of more commercial forms. For example, one can study Reddit’s platform for news and discussion or Amazon’s platform for consumer reviews as peer production, as these contain many of the same principles for the decentralized creation of value. Likewise, there are examples of open source production that are perceived as more “closed,” such as the Android OS (Currie et al., 2013). I would argue that more commercial or closed forms of peer production lack the degree of autonomy found in Wikipedia and many open source communities, as discussed in the next section. My normative position is that these autonomous communities should be studied with the intent of serious critique and engagement that can ultimately be put to use in making them stronger and helping them live up to the lofty ideals they set for themselves. That said, it must be noted that the values and practices I identify can and often will be present in commercial forms of peer production, if not to the same degrees or articulated in the same ways. Finally, my emphasis here is on describing a framework rather than providing exhaustive detail about specific communities or cultures – my hope is that supplying a “bigger picture” at the expense of rigorous description will help readers to compare and contrast the different cultures of peer production they will encounter in this Handbook and elsewhere.