Andreea Gorbatai, Organational Behavior PhD
Thesis Chair: Mikolaj Jan Piskorski
Social Structure and Mechanisms of Collective Production: Evidence from Wikipedia
My dissertation work focuses on the phenomenon of collective production, defined as collective action oriented towards production of free goods. This encompasses a wide variety of collective action settings from neighborhood improvement projects and cultural production to online collaborative production of knowledge goods such as software, encyclopedic articles, or travel information repositories.
In my work I examine the conditions under which collective production is successful at retaining participants and responding to social needs. I identify three main problems with collective production: first, because collective production is open to any volunteers who are interested in participating to the creation of free goods, production may suffer due to low quality contributions. Second, because volunteers self-organize to produce, they may fail to create and respect social norms; and last, because volunteers may have other personal and work commitments, they may cease contributing due to role conflicts.
In my three papers I identify three social mechanisms which counterintuitively alleviate these problems. The first study, based on a unique longitudinal dataset of article editing and reading from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, shows that consumer contributions are necessary because they act a signal of social need to producers who are able to improve the goods. In the second study, currently R&R at The American Journal of Sociology, my co-author Mikolaj Jan Piskorski and I examine network density, social norm infringement and enforcement, and participation in collective production, and prove that norm infringement is not completely detrimental to participation, because subsequent enforcement results in increased likelihood that the beneficiary will participate again. These results rely on a large longitudinal dataset of participation networks and norm-related behavior in the English Wikipedia. In my third paper, based on interview data with experienced Wikipedia contributors, I propose that individuals who are involved in collaborative work without being involved in personal relationships with other participants, and who have strong outside commitments are more likely to remain involved than participants who forge personal ties with other contributors at the expense of other ties and commitments. This paper brings together power-dependence theory and economic sociology research to propose a potential downside of embeddedness in collaborative production.
