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5 Cultures of Peer Production
Michael Stevenson
1 Introduction: Peer Production as Cultural Production
How can we make sense of cultures of peer production, which exist in diverse national, cultural and language contexts, span several industries and domains, and comprise a range of different organizational structures?1 Peer production is commonly defined as a mode of production – that is, a social and material structure in which labor takes place. Specifically it is defined as a decentralized mode of production in which a group of participants collaborate on a common project (say, an operating system or an encyclopedia), and in which individuals self‐select for specific parts of an overall project and generally volunteer their time (Benkler, 2002). Given this definition of peer production as a mode of production, it makes little sense to talk about a single culture – defined as a more‐or‐less shared set of values, expressed in a common identity and shared practices – much like it makes little sense to speak of the culture of factories or the culture of firms. In practice, however, there are certainly comparisons to be drawn between the values and practices commonly found in peer production projects, in particular in the well‐known examples of Wikipedia and FOSS production.
To set the groundwork for understanding cultures of peer production, this chapter argues that it is necessary to see that peer production is, by and large, a form of cultural production. Cultural production refers to aesthetic and intellectual forms of production, from literature and music to journalism and academic scholarship. It may seem strange at first to compare the production of open source software or Wikipedia to these fields, since for example we often think of traditional cultural production as an individual pursuit (ignoring how such practice is always collaborative (Becker, 1984)). In the following, I show how this analogy and corresponding theory helps us to see how (1) peer production projects are clearly embedded in existing cultural fields, and often represent an autonomous form of production that seeks to resist certain economic and political pressures in favor of core values such as meritocracy and openness and (2) such autonomy is achieved through the enactment of those core values, which are in turn related to the social hierarchies, forms of exclusion, and other limitations that characterize these projects and the groups of people who populate them.
2 Overview and Limitations
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,
