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1 – 10 of over 7000Linus Dahlander, Lars Bo Jeppesen and Henning Piezunka
Crowdsourcing – a form of collaboration across organizational boundaries – provides access to knowledge beyond an organization’s local knowledge base. Integrating work on…
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Crowdsourcing – a form of collaboration across organizational boundaries – provides access to knowledge beyond an organization’s local knowledge base. Integrating work on organization theory and innovation, the authors first develop a framework that characterizes crowdsourcing into a main sequential process, through which organizations (1) define the task they wish to have completed; (2) broadcast to a pool of potential contributors; (3) attract a crowd of contributors; and (4) select among the inputs they receive. For each of these phases, the authors identify the key decisions organizations make, provide a basic explanation for each decision, discuss the trade-offs organizations face when choosing among decision alternatives, and explore how organizations may resolve these trade-offs. Using this decision-centric approach, the authors continue by showing that there are fundamental interdependencies in the process that makes the coordination of crowdsourcing challenging.
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This chapter introduces the approaches and methods employed in a four-country research project that resulted in the 2017 report The People in the Pictures: Vital perspectives on…
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This chapter introduces the approaches and methods employed in a four-country research project that resulted in the 2017 report The People in the Pictures: Vital perspectives on Save the Children’s image making. It presents and explores the ethical issues that emerged throughout the process of the research, particularly in relation to photo elicitation – the use of images (still and moving) within both interviews and focus groups. Interviews and focus groups took place in the UK, Jordan, Bangladesh, and Niger with a total of 202 research participants. The research involved sharing Save the Children content (fundraising materials, published reports, online news features, TV adverts, and short films) with research participants. Research participants included those featured in some of these visual communication materials (referred to as contributors), and other individuals within their communities (referred to as non-contributors). The following principles and decisions informed the research design: safe and ethical practice; inclusive, engaging and accessible approaches; the participation of children; prioritising first-hand accounts; no photography or filming; and the preparation of location- and language-specific resources for each interview and focus group. The main ethical issues to emerge during the design of the research related to predicting (and responding) to any potential negative impacts of the research on participants, particularly contributors, but also children. The researchers also experienced some unexpected ethical encounters, including visual materials causing some concern or distress. Additionally, assuring research participants’ anonymity led to the necessity of extra care when publishing the report and the use of images within that.
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Alessandro Lomi, Guido Conaldi and Marco Tonellato
When considered as organized solutions to problems of provision of public goods, Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) productions share a number of their defining features with the…
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When considered as organized solutions to problems of provision of public goods, Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) productions share a number of their defining features with the organized anarchies described by Cohen, March and Olsen in their “Garbage Can Model” (GCM). The open and voluntary contribution of software developers creates constant fluctuations in levels of attention and an extremely fluid participation. The lack of predefined hierarchical access to organizational problems determines a fundamental uncertainty about how collective goals may be linked to individual activities, and in how responsibilities and tasks may be allocated efficiently within the project. Finally, the complexity involved in the collective production of tens of thousands of lines of computer code without explicit coordination creates a situation of technological ambiguity supported by a radically decentralized activity of organizational problem finding and problem solving. In this paper we take these broad similarities as point of departure to specify an empirical model that captures some of the garbage can properties of organizational problem-solving activities in the context of a specific F/OSS project followed throughout a complete release cycle. We examine the interconnected system of individual decisions emerging from problem-solving activities performed by the 135 contributors involved in the F/OSS project on the 719 software bugs reported during the period of observation. We treat the evolving two-mode network produced by encounters between carriers of organizational solutions (contributors) and organizational problems (software bugs) as a dynamic opportunity structure that constrains and enables organizational decision making. We document how stable local configurations linking problems and solutions are induced by – and at the same time sustain – decentralized problem-solving activities with meaningful self-organizing properties.
Paul Belleflamme and Thomas Lambert
This chapter shows how the theory of industrial organization can help us understand some important aspects of crowdfunding that go beyond the finance sphere of the firm. A special…
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This chapter shows how the theory of industrial organization can help us understand some important aspects of crowdfunding that go beyond the finance sphere of the firm. A special attention is devoted to the role and behavior of crowdfunding platforms, which intermediate between entrepreneurs and contributors.
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Raghu Garud, Arun Kumaraswamy and Philipp Tuertscher
We examine how digital technologies enable distributed actors to collaborate asynchronously on virtual projects. We use Wikipedia and associated wiki digital technology as the…
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We examine how digital technologies enable distributed actors to collaborate asynchronously on virtual projects. We use Wikipedia and associated wiki digital technology as the research site for our exploration. Our probe of the emergence of Wikipedia articles highlights a distinctive property of such digital technologies: in their very use, they generate a digital trace. This digital trace serves as a generative memory that facilitates ongoing cocreation, justification, and materialization of contributions from distributed actors. We examine the implications of such processes for virtual projects that embrace digital technologies with properties similar to the wiki technology used in Wikipedia.
Clayton D. Peoples and Michael Gortari
In both the academic and public policy realms, debates have gone on for decades concerning the influence of class-based interest groups on policymaking. Virtually no work in this…
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In both the academic and public policy realms, debates have gone on for decades concerning the influence of class-based interest groups on policymaking. Virtually no work in this area compares influence in the U.S. with influence in Canada despite the fact that the countries provide interesting differences in the social and political contexts within which influence may occur. In this chapter, we analyze how receiving money from the same business and labor entities (“political action committees” in the U.S.) influences similarity in voting among legislators in the 105th U.S. House of Representatives (1997–1998). We then perform the same analysis for the 36th Canadian House of Commons (1997–2000). In the U.S., we find that sharing business contributors significantly affects vote similarity among legislators, whereas sharing labor contributors does not. This supports elite-power and class-based theories and bolsters the arguments of those who feel more campaign finance reform may be necessary. In Canada, however, sharing contributors of either type has no effect on vote similarity among parliamentarians, which supports state-centered theory and lends credence to those arguing additional reforms may be unnecessary. These findings suggest that structural context matters greatly for patterns of political power.
Science is too important to be left solely to scientists, and so the public need to be involved in the design, funding, delivery and implementation of health research, and in…
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Science is too important to be left solely to scientists, and so the public need to be involved in the design, funding, delivery and implementation of health research, and in discussions about the ethics of research. Since the 1960s, the United Kingdom and many other countries have included scientists from outside health care in various roles in health care research, as well as nonscientists, ordinary citizens, patients and carers. In the last 20 years, these roles have increased in number and range, but significant challenges remain in ensuring that research is always conducted in an ethical fashion. Errors arise when it is assumed that research is ethical because it has passed a single test rather than being subject to constant vigilance; when academic training on its own is regarded as sufficient to guarantee ethical conduct; when pontification about sophisticated dilemmas ignores fundamental matters of equity and helpfulness and when there is an absence of curiosity about the value positions of others (Boaz et al., 2016). We argue in this chapter that in every setting, citizens have the potential to contribute to ethical debates, whether they assist in establishing priorities for research funding, serve as research funding co-applicants, take the lay member places on Research Ethics Committees and Steering Committees, collect and analyze data or co-author academic papers.
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Ogechi Adeola, Ifedapo Adeleye, Oserere Ibelegbu, Babalola Josiah Olajubu and Isaiah Adisa
This chapter presents case studies that explore the structures of indigenous savings group practices in Nigeria. Indigenous savings groups in Nigeria can be categorised as either…
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This chapter presents case studies that explore the structures of indigenous savings group practices in Nigeria. Indigenous savings groups in Nigeria can be categorised as either unstructured, semi-structured or structured. These categorisation of savings groups can follow two patterns, which include Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) and Accumulated Savings and Credit Associations (ASCAs). Through a qualitative case analysis of savings practices in Nigeria, we observed that the indigenous savings groups have similar goals and orientations, though their operating structures differ. The chapter highlighted the relative theme that cuts across these cases, and insightful recommendations are provided for upscaling and adopting indigenous savings groups in Nigeria and Africa. The chapter also discusses the role of government in facilitating savings and credit disbursement to groups. The implications for business actors and the government are highlighted.
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Luca Giustiniano, Terri L. Griffith and Ann Majchrzak
For at least three decades, inter-organizational collaboration (IOC) has attracted scholarly attention and many studies have unveiled its inner dynamics. More recently, new…
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For at least three decades, inter-organizational collaboration (IOC) has attracted scholarly attention and many studies have unveiled its inner dynamics. More recently, new phenomena have appeared in the changing landscape of IOC, affecting the way in which organizations are open to interact with, and rely upon, other actors that may be standalone entities as well as representatives of other organizations. These actors operate “betwixt and between” the organizational core and its external environment(s), populating a liminal space located at the organization’s boundary in which activities take place according to non-proprietary and non-employment logics. The authors focus on the forms of collaboration, which blur the lines between organizations, calling into question the fundamental label of crowd-focused IOCs. The authors consider two forms: crowd-open and crowd-based organizations. The authors show the organizational design impact of openness spans from the mere scalability associated with organizational growth to the phenomena of reshaping formalization and standardization of roles and processes, and self-organizing over time.
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