Editing Organizing and Governance in Online Communities (UW COM597 Winter 2025) (section)

== Schedule ==
=== Friday January 10: Introduction ===

;Assignments:
* Complete and post your response to reading [https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1808091/discussion_topics in the appropriate discussion forum] by 11:59pm on Thursday (see [[#Weekly Response Papers]])
* In [https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1808091/discussion_topics the appropriate forum], ''briefly'' respond to at least two of your classmates and make sure to nominate at least two of their questions for group discussion by 12:00p (noon) on Friday (see [[#Weekly Response Papers]])

;Required readings:

This pair of two articles on peer production:
* Coase, Ronald H. 1937. “The Nature of the Firm.” ''Economica'' 4 (16): 386–405. https://doi.org/10.2307/2626876. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.2307/2626876}}
* Benkler, Yochai. 2002. “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm.” ''Yale Law Journal'' 112 (3): 369–446. https://doi.org/10.2307/1562247. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.2307/1562247}}

These articles on "community" and it's relationships to organizations, especially in online spaces:

* Bruckman, Amy. 2006. “A New Perspective on ‘Community’ and Its Implications for Computer-Mediated Communication Systems.” In ''CHI ’06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems'', 616–21. Montréal, Québec, Canada: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/1125451.1125579. {{avail-free|https://doi.org/10.1145/1125451.1125579}}
* Hampton, Keith N. 2016. “Persistent and Pervasive Community: New Communication Technologies and the Future of Community.” ''American Behavioral Scientist'' 60 (1): 101–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764215601714. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764215601714}}
* O’Mahony, Siobhan, and Karim R. Lakhani. 2011. “Organizations in the Shadow of Communities.” In ''Communities and Organizations'', 33:3–36. Emerald Group Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X(2011)0000033004. {{avail-free|1=https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1873989}}

;Optional reading:

* Oldenburg, Ray. 1989. ''The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You Through the Day''. First Edition. New York: Paragon House. [Chapter 1 ("The Problem of Place in America") and Chapter 2 ("The Character of Third Places")]  {{avail-canvas|1=https://canvas.uw.edu/files/128963059/download?download_frd=1}}

=== Friday January 17: Introduction: Agency, Structure, and Governance ===

;Assignments:
* Complete and post your response to reading [https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1808091/discussion_topics in the appropriate discussion forum] by 11:59pm on Thursday (see [[#Weekly Response Papers]])
* In [https://canvas.uw.edu/courses/1808091/discussion_topics the appropriate forum], ''briefly'' respond to at least two of your classmates and make sure to nominate at least two of their questions for group discussion by 12:00p (noon) on Friday (see [[#Weekly Response Papers]])

;Required readings:

The [[:wikipedia:structure and agency|argument over the primacy of agency and structure in shaping society]] is probably the most important animating debate in both the classical and contemporary social sciences and has important connections to thinking about governance. We'll read classic texts from both perspectives as well a series of more recent texts that have extended these ideas into thinking about governance in online communities.

Here are two pieces about rational choice (a position strongly associated with a focus on individual agency):

* Simon, Herbert A. 1955. “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice.” ''The Quarterly Journal of Economics' 69 (1): 99–118. https://doi.org/10.2307/1884852. {{Avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.2307/1884852}}
* Champion, Kaylea. 2020. “Characterizing Online Vandalism: A Rational Choice Perspective.” In ''International Conference on Social Media and Society (SMSociety’20)'', 47–57. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3400806.3400813. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1145/3400806.3400813}}

Here is a set of pieces about social structure, authority, and governance (especially bureaucracy):

* Weber, Max. 2019. ''Economy and Society: A New Translation''. Translated by Keith Tribe. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. [Ch. 1, Pt. II: "The Concept of Social Action" (pgs. 99-138); Ch. 3: "Types of Rule", Pt. 1-4 9 (pgs. 338-378)] {{avail-canvas|1=https://canvas.uw.edu/files/129316420/download?download_frd=1}}
* Kreiss, Daniel, Megan Finn, and Fred Turner. 2011. “The Limits of Peer Production: Some Reminders from Max Weber for the Network Society.” ''New Media & Society'' 13 (2): 243–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810370951. {{Avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810370951}}
* O’Neil, Mathieu. 2014. “Hacking Weber: Legitimacy, Critique, and Trust in Peer Production.” ''Information, Communication & Society'' 17 (7): 872–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.850525. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.850525}} 
* Schneider, Nathan. 2022. “Admins, Mods, and Benevolent Dictators for Life: The Implicit Feudalism of Online Communities.” New Media & Society 24 (9): 1965–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820986553. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820986553}}

;Optional readings:
* Weber, Max. 2019. ''Economy and Society: A New Translation''. Translated by Keith Tribe. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. [The remainder of Chas. 1 and 3 plus very short "Overviews" notes to the chapters (pgs. 74-138, 335-449)] {{avail-canvas|1=https://canvas.uw.edu/files/129206284/download?download_frd=1}}
* Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1959. “Bureaucratic and Craft Administration of Production: A Comparative Study.” ''Administrative Science Quarterly'' 4 (2): 168–87. https://doi.org/10.2307/2390676. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.2307/2390676}}
* Weber, Max. 1978. “Chapter IX: Bureaucracy.” In ''Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology'', edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 956–1005. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. {{avail-canvas|1=https://canvas.uw.edu/files/129206133/download?download_frd=1}}

=== Friday January 24: Collective Action {{tentative}} ===

* Olson, Mancur. 1965. ''The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups''. First Edition. Harvard University Press. [Selections] {{forthcoming}}
* Lupia, Arthur, and Gisela Sin. 2003. “Which Public Goods Are Endangered?: How Evolving Communication Technologies Affect the Logic of Collective Action.” ''Public Choice'' 117 (3): 315–31. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:PUCH.0000003735.07840.c7. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1023/B:PUCH.0000003735.07840.c7}}
* Bimber, Bruce, Andrew J. Flanagin, and Cynthia Stohl. 2005. “Reconceptualizing Collective Action in the Contemporary Media Environment.” ''Communication Theory'' 15 (4): 365–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2005.tb00340.x. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2005.tb00340.x}}
* Bennett, W. Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg. 2012. “The Logic of Connective Action.” Information, Communication & Society 15 (5): 739–68. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.670661}}

Optional:

* Bimber, Bruce A., Andrew J. Flanagin, and Cynthia Stohl. 2012. ''Collective Action in Organizations: Interaction and Engagement in an Era of Technological Change''. Communication, Society and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

=== Friday January 31: Institutionalism {{tentative}} ===

* DiMaggio, Paul J., and Walter W. Powell. 1983. “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields.” American Sociological Review 48 (2): 147–60. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095101. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.2307/2095101}}
* Meyer, John W., and Brian Rowan. 1977. “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony.” American Journal of Sociology 83 (2): 340–63. {{avail-uw|https://www.jstor.org/stable/2778293}}
* Powell, Walter W., and Paul J. DiMaggio. 2012. “Introduction.” In The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis. University of Chicago Press. {{forthcoming}}
* Weick, Karl E. 1976. “Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems.” Administrative Science Quarterly 21 (1): 1–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/2391875. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.2307/2391875}}

Optional:
* Stinchcombe, Arthur L. 1997. “On the Virtues of the Old Institutionalism.” Annual Review of Sociology 23 (Volume 23, 1997): 1–18. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.23.1.1}}.

=== Friday February 7: Organizational Ecology {{tentative}} ===

* Hannan, Michael T., and John Freeman. 1977. “The Population Ecology of Organizations.” ''American Journal of Sociology'' 82 (5): 929–64. https://doi.org/10.1086/226424. {avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1086/226424}}
* Young, Ruth C. 1988. “Is Population Ecology a Useful Paradigm for the Study of Organizations?” ''American Journal of Sociology'' 94 (1): 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1086/228949. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1086/228949}}
* Carroll, Glenn R., and Anand Swaminathan. 2000. “Why the Microbrewery Movement? Organizational Dynamics of Resource Partitioning in the U.S. Brewing Industry.” ''American Journal of Sociology'' 106 (3): 715–62. https://doi.org/10.1086/318962. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1086/318962}}

* Wang, Xiaoqing, Brian S. Butler, and Yuqing Ren. 2013. “The Impact of Membership Overlap on Growth: An Ecological Competition View of Online Groups.” ''Organization Science'' 24 (2): 414–31. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0756. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0756}}
* Zhu, Haiyi, Jilin Chen, Tara Matthews, Aditya Pal, Hernan Badenes, and Robert E. Kraut. 2014. “Selecting an Effective Niche: An Ecological View of the Success of Online Communities.” In ''Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’14)'', 301–10. New York, New York: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557348. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557348}} {{tentative}}
* Zhu, Haiyi, Robert E. Kraut, and Aniket Kittur. 2014. “The Impact of Membership Overlap on the Survival of Online Communities.” In ''Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems'', 281–90. CHI ’14. New York, NY: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557213. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557213}}
* TeBlunthuis, Nathan, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2022. “Identifying Competition and Mutualism between Online Groups.” In ''Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM ’22)'', 16:993–1004. Palo, Alto, California: AAAI Press. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19352. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19352}}


Optional:

* Bruderl, Josef, and Rudolf Schussler. 1990. “Organizational Mortality: The Liabilities of Newness and Adolescence.” ''Administrative Science Quarterly'' 35 (3): 530–47. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393316. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.2307/2393316}}

=== Friday February 14: Learning and Sensemaking {{tentative}} ===

* March, James G. 1991. “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning.” ''Organization Science'' 2 (1): 71–87. {{forthcoming}}
* Levitt, Barbara, and James G. March. 1988. “Organizational Learning.” ''Annual Review of Sociology'' 14 (1): 319–38. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.14.080188.001535. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.so.14.080188.001535}}
* Kane, Gerald C., and Maryam Alavi. 2007. “Information Technology and Organizational Learning: An Investigation of Exploration and Exploitation Processes.” ''Organization Science'' 18 (5): 796–812. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1070.0286. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1070.0286}}

* Weick, Karl E. 1993. “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster.” ''Administrative Science Quarterly'' 38 (4): 628–52. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393339. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.2307/2393339}}
* Weick, Karl E., Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, and David Obstfeld. 2005. “Organizing and the Process of Sensemaking.” ''Organization Science'' 16 (4): 409–21. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0133. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0133}}
* Mamykina, Lena, Drashko Nakikj, and Noemie Elhadad. 2015. “Collective Sensemaking in Online Health Forums.” In ''Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15)'', 3217–26. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702566. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702566}}
* Krafft, Peter, Kaitlyn Zhou, Isabelle Edwards, Kate Starbird, and Emma S. Spiro. 2017. “Centralized, Parallel, and Distributed Information Processing during Collective Sensemaking.” In ''Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’17)'', 2976–87. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3026012.

Optional:

* Weick, Karl E. 1995. ''Sensemaking in Organizations''. 1st ed. Sage Publications, Inc. [Selections] {{forthcoming}}
* Russo, Renato, Paulo Blikstein, and Ioana Literat. 2024. “Twisted Knowledge Construction on X/Twitter: An Analysis of Constructivist Sensemaking on Social Media Leading to Political Radicalization.” ''Information and Learning Sciences'' 125 (9): 693–719. https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-12-2023-0210. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-12-2023-0210}}

=== Friday February 21: Governance: Exit and Voice {{tentative}} ===

* Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. ''Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.'' Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
* Turco, Catherine J. 2016. ''The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media''. New York: Columbia University Press.
* Frey, Seth, and Nathan Schneider. 2023. “Effective Voice: Beyond Exit and Affect in Online Communities.” ''New Media & Society'' 25 (9): 2381–98. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211044025.

=== Friday February 28: Governance: Commons-based Approaches {{tentative}} ===

* Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. ''Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action''. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. [Selections] {{forthcoming}}
* Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom, eds. 2011. ''Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice''. The MIT Press.  [Selections] {{forthcoming}}
*  Frischmann, Brett M., Michael J. Madison, and Katherine Jo Strandburg. 2014. ''Governing Knowledge Commons''. Oxford University Press. [Selections] {{forthcoming}}
* Frey, Seth, P. M. Krafft, and Brian C. Keegan. 2019. “‘this Place Does What It Was Built for’: Designing Digital Institutions for Participatory Change.” ''Proceedings of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction''. 3 (CSCW): 32:1-32:31. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359134. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1145/3359134}}
* Schneider, Nathan. 2024. ''Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life''. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.181. [Selections] {{forthcoming}}
* Silberman, M. Six. 2016. “Reading Elinor Ostrom in Silicon Valley: Exploring Institutional Diversity on the Internet.” In ''Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP ’16)'', 363–68. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2957276.2957311.

Optional:

* Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” ''Science'' 162 (3859): 1243–48. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243}}

=== Friday March 7: Governance: Democracy and Participation {{tentative}} ===

* Michels, Robert. 2016. ''Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchial Tendencies of Modern Democracy''. Translated by Eden Paul. Martino Fine Books.  [Selections] {{forthcoming}}
* Lipset, Seymour Marti.ng 1956. Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press. [Selections] {{forthcoming}}
* Shaw, Aaron, and Benjamin M. Hill. 2014. “Laboratories of Oligarchy? How the Iron Law Extends to Peer Production.” ''Journal of Communication'' 64 (2): 215–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12082.
* Freeman, Jo. 1972. “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” ''Berkeley Journal of Sociology'' 17 (January):151–64. {{forthcoming}}
* Dunbar-Hester, Christina. 2019. ''Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures''. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Selections] {{forthcoming}}
* Kelty, Christopher M. 2017. “Too Much Democracy in All the Wrong Places: Toward a Grammar of Participation.” ''Current Anthropology'' 58 (S15): S77–90. https://doi.org/10.1086/688705. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1086/688705}}
* Kelty, Christopher, and Seth Erickson. 2018. “Two Modes of Participation: A Conceptual Analysis of 102 Cases of Internet and Social Media Participation from 2005–2015.” ''The Information Society'' 34 (2): 71–87. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2017.1414092. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2017.1414092}}

Optional:

* Voss, Kim, and Rachel Sherman. 2000. “Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy: Union Revitalization in the American Labor Movement.” ''American Journal of Sociology'' 106 (2): 303–49. https://doi.org/10.1086/ajs.2000.106.issue-2. {{avail-uw|https://doi.org/10.1086/ajs.2000.106.issue-2}}

=== Friday March 14: Final Presentations ===

The full class session will be devoted to final presentations.