Book: Cyberchiefs. Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes. Mathieu O’Neil. Macmillan/Pluto Press, 2009.

Peer production is by now a very accepted term and concept and it has its classic study, i.e. The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler.

But I can’t really say that the second concept of the P2P Theory trilogy, i.e. peer governance, has taken off in any real sense, though many studies do tackle the governance of open source communities, but without naming it as peer governance. Does this mean that researchers do not recognize this as a separate area of study?

In any case, the classic study there is Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source.

Now however, comes a second book, which I only discovered after hearing its author Mathieu O’Neill, speak at Oekonux 4.

I have just started reading it and will post my own review later, I think it’s fair to say that it is the very first monography to specifically tackle the study authority and leadership in peer production communities, and from what I’ve read so far, it’s very promising. So I find this publication significant, as a founding moment for the dedicated study of peer governance, even though the author does not use the concept.

Here’s a short summary by the publisher, followed by the motivation of the author, which I requested from him by email.

Mathieu O’Neil:

“People are inventing new ways of working together on the internet. Decentralized production thrives on weblogs, wikis and free software projects. InCyberchiefs, Mathieu O’Neil focuses on the regulation of these working relationships. He examines the transformation of leadership and expertise in online networks, and the emergence of innovative forms of participatory politics. What are the costs and benefits of alternatives to hierarchical organization? Using case studies of online projects or “tribes” such as the radical Primitivism archive, the Daily Kos political blog, the Debian free software project and Wikipedia, O’Neil shows that leaders must support maximum autonomy for participants and analyses the tensions generated by this distribution of authority.”

Mathieu O’Neil on Why I wrote ‘Cyberchiefs’:

“I wanted to answer this question: how does power operate within groups who reject domination? How do leaders justify their authority in anarchistic communities on the Internet? This meant that there needed to be a new theory of power, something which sociology was uniquely equipped to do, but which had not yet happened. This theory would have to take into account the different dimensions of power online: power as an archaic force (a male universe of hackers); as a collectivist enterprise (the rejection of traditional forms of hierarchy); as the affective recognition of the extraordinary brilliance of great individuals and the extraordinary position of great nodes on a network – but what happens to charisma when it is distributed?

I did my PhD research on zines (idiosyncratic marginal magazines) in the San Francisco Bay Area in the nineties. My approach was influenced by Pierre Bourdieu: here is an underground market with its own rules of the games, systems of oppositions, and it is a way for people to show how ‘cool’ they are in relation to mainstream culture. So in a sense they are really reproducing dominant patterns of cultural distinction. But, there are oppositions as to what constitutes ‘coolness’ between punks who reject correct discourse, and others who embrace correction, which reflect different positions in the social space, and different strategies for political enagagement.

One thing that really interested me at the time is how do you make people respect the rules of reciprocity in autonomous fields without formal justice and police systems? Apart from public shaming, there wasn’t much that could be done about people who didn’t send zines even though someone else had send them a zine or a few dollars. I was also interested in the networking aspect: who is a hub, who operates as a bridge between disconnected groups, etc.

When weblogs started I was struck by the similarity with zines: blogs were going to ‘retake the media’, and so on. So I started looking at them, doing surveys like I had done with zines. I also learnt more about webmetrics; about social network analysis and network theory mechanisms such as ‘preferential attachment’ (new entrants on networks tend to link to the incumbents: the centrally located – the rich – always get richer, the poor can never catch up). I looked at social anthropology (conflicts, boundaries, monstrous ‘others’) and political anthropology (tribes as societies against the state, as rejection of separated power), I spent a lot of time with political philosophy (the public sphere, counter-publics) but ended up cutting that chapter out, and the biggest new influence was perhaps Luc Boltanski and the key concept of justification; also his idea that it is not just sociologists who can understand and uncover domination (what Bourdieu or Foucault say) but that ordinary people have reflexivity, can evaluate the respective claims of people during conflicts.

All this inexorably led me back to a founding block of sociology, Max Weber’s classic theory of legitimate power or authority. Justification is not so different from legitimation. The starting point to forge appropriate conceptual tools for the analysis of leadership in online settings is the recognition that on the Internet authority must integrate autonomy or risk being rejected as overly authoritarian. In the online context, administrative authority is the capacity to exclude people from a network, or to limit the actions they can undertake on that network. The distribution of administrative authority to autonomous individuals is an essential part of the appeal of mass volunteer projects such as Wikipedia, because it gives new entrants the possibility of rapidly attaining positions of power.

Weber distinguished four types of social action: traditional, affectual, instrumentally rational and value-rational. (1) The first three forms correspond respectively to traditional (hereditary), charismatic (revolutionary) and legal-rational (bureaucratic) bases of authority. Weber did not equate the last form of social action to a specific authority type. Organisational scholars have argued that value-rational social action was apparent in egalitarian or collectivist forms of organisation such as, in the 1970s, free schools and clinics or alternative newspapers; (2) and, in the contemporary period, self-organised Internet communities such as the Debian Free Software project. (3) But while organisation science provides useful tools for the analysis of Internet sociality, it fails to take into account the full range of authority types which occur in online communities. In the case of Wikipedia for example, the project founder’s charismatic prestige routinely allows him to legitimately overrule collective decisions.

What is the impact of online networking on charisma? To answer, the origins of this variant of legitimate power must be considered. Computer engineers or “hackers” (not to be confused with computer vandals or thieves) created the Internet’s protocols. If computer code was efficient and elegant, its author was rewarded with high status; more recently, great figures in the Free Software galaxy, who aimed to protect code from the impurity of copyright control, have been described in quasi-mystical tones. (4) In the process scientific expertise became independent from hierarchical organisations: hackers recognised only the judgment of their peers. The authority of experts is traditionally subordinated to the authority of leaders. However when the Internet was developed learned authority to a great extent determined administrative authority, as only computer hackers knew how to run the systems. Following the lead of hackers, expertise on the Internet became dependent not on credentials issued by an institution to an individual, in the shape of a diploma or professional certificate, but on an individual’s unique skill, developed over time, and publicly demonstrated.

Beetham (5) suggests that two legitimising principles are more emancipatory than others. The first is the principle of democratic sovereignty, based on the collective will of the group. The second is the meritocratic principle of differentiation which, in theory, challenges the reproduction of advantage. On the Internet, meritocracy was separated by hackers from institutional hierarchy and bureaucracy. Merit assumed an anti-authoritarian slant, based on the regard for the charismatic genius of great initiators (hacker-charisma), and, subsequently, on the charismatic position of great nodes (index-charisma), the latter determined by the aggregation of the decisions of multiple individuals, as exemplified by Google’s PageRank algorithm.

The principles of autonomous charisma and democratic sovereignty structure online authority. It should also be noted that there is a clear gender imbalance in the distribution of prestigious founders and central nodes: early entrants in online communities, who benefit from “preferential attachment” (6) are predominantly male. This imbalance is accompanied by the persistence of archaic forms of domination based on a masculine logic of conflict and honour, apparent in such behaviour as trolling and flaming. Apart from the relationship between autonomy and authority, I wanted to understand how new forms of leadership and expertise challenge or conform to informational capitalism; how communities address sexism, hierarchy, equality, justice and bureaucracy according to the structure of their relations of authority; and what this means for the future of autonomy. ”

References:

(1) Max Weber (1978 [1922]) Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

(2) Joyce Rothschild-Whitt (1979) “The collectivist organisation: An alternative to rational-bureaucratic models”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 44, No. 4, pp. 509-525.

(3) Siobhán O’Mahony and Fabrizio Ferraro (2007) “The emergence of governance in an open source community”, Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 50, No. 5, pp. 1079-1106.

(4) Moody, Glyn (2001) Rebel Code. Linux and the Open Source Revolution, London: Allen Lane.

(5) David Beetham (1991) The Legitimation of Power, London: Routledge.

(6) Albert Barabàsi (2002) Linked: The New Science of Networks. Cambridge, MA: Perseus.