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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, openness, and inspiration, with each of these concepts corresponding to one of the following sections. In Section 3, I discuss the autonomy of peer production projects and their position within larger fields of software and media production, or what might be described as a larger field of “tech” or the field of new media production (Stevenson, 2016). The distinction of peer production projects is closely related to core values and assumptions, in particular meritocracy, and Section 4 examines this value and the cultural practices associated with it. Section 5 discusses openness as a key value and disposition within peer production cultures, elaborating on this with examples such as Wikipedia’s “good faith collaboration” (Reagle, 2012). Section 6 asks what kind of moral “order of worth” (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006) justifies commitment to peer production projects, and argues that we should especially consider the role of inspiration and the importance of the affective dimension of contributing to these projects.

      In this introduction to the cultures of peer production, I have made various decisions that should be noted. First, this chapter draws its framework largely from Bourdieu’s field theory (1993) and Boltanski and Thévenot’s sociology of critique (2006). In addition to the fact that a number of other sociological theories have been used to make sense of cultures of peer production, it should be noted that the theories I have chosen contain significantly different assumptions: critics argue that Bourdieu’s theory does not account for the agency of individuals, something that Boltanski and Thévenot specifically aim to address by arguing that individuals reflect on their actions and seek to justify them through appeals to various kinds of valuation, or “orders of worth” (see, e.g., O’Neil, 2011 for a discussion of this difference). Despite this internal inconsistency, I have chosen this combination as it helps to highlight (1) the relational forms of structure that give meaning to peer production projects and actions within them, for example through oppositions that actors draw between autonomy and commercial or political influence, and (2) how participants justify their commitment to these projects and specific actions within them. Second, although some definitions of peer production include entities such as Google’s search engine (which analyzes the hyperlinks produced by a decentralized group of actors in order to produce better search results), this chapter draws on a specific subset of commons‐based peer production based on intentional collective action, specifically Wikipedia and free and open source software (FOSS) production. In addition to their intentional nature, in Bourdieu’s terminology I am limiting my examples to “autonomous” examples of peer production, at the expense of more commercial forms. For example, one can study Reddit’s platform for news and discussion or Amazon’s platform for consumer reviews as peer production, as these contain many of the same principles for the decentralized creation of value. Likewise, there are examples of open source production that are perceived as more “closed,” such as the Android OS (Currie et al., 2013). I would argue that more commercial or closed forms of peer production lack the degree of autonomy found in Wikipedia and many open source communities, as discussed in the next section. My normative position is that these autonomous communities should be studied with the intent of serious critique and engagement that can ultimately be put to use in making them stronger and helping them live up to the lofty ideals they set for themselves. That said, it must be noted that the values and practices I identify can and often will be present in commercial forms of peer production, if not to the same degrees or articulated in the same ways. Finally, my emphasis here is on describing a framework rather than providing exhaustive detail about specific communities or cultures – my hope is that supplying a “bigger picture” at the expense of rigorous description will help readers to compare and contrast the different cultures of peer production they will encounter in this Handbook and elsewhere.

3 Autonomy

Field theory helps us to see how peer production projects are situated in broader structures of power. With this framework, Bourdieu (1993) outlines how society consists of fields, semi‐autonomous domains of social activity. In addition to fields of power (i.e., the fields of politics, economics, and law) there are cultural fields that Bourdieu defines as fields of aesthetic and intellectual production: art, journalism, and academia would fit this description. All fields are semi‐autonomous: on the one hand they have an independence demonstrated through internal consistency – shared “rules,” values, practices and so on; on the other hand, they continually impact one another to differing degrees. The journalistic field certainly impacts the fields of political and economic power, for example, but not to the same degree that it is in turn shaped by them. Internally, fields are shaped hierarchically, meaning actors have different levels and kinds of power. According to Bourdieu actors are also positioned in relation to two poles: towards the field’s autonomous pole actors demonstrate a capacity to resist pressures from outside fields (in particular political and market pressures), whereas towards the field’s heteronomous pole they are less likely to demonstrate a commitment to the field’s autonomous values. In the sense used here, autonomy refers to the autonomy of a peer production project rather than the autonomy of individuals working on that project (although