Andreea Daniela Gorbatai

Testing Coleman’s Social-Norm Enforcement Mechanism: Evidence from Wikipedia

Since Durkheim, sociologists have believed that actors in dense network structures experience fewer norm violations. Coleman proposed one explanatory mechanism, arguing that dense networks provide an opportunity structure to reward those who punish norm violators, leading to more frequent punishment and in turn fewer norm violations. Despite ubiquitous scholarly references to Coleman’s theory, little empirical work has directly tested it in large-scale natural settings with longitudinal data. The authors undertake such a test using records of norm violations during the editing process on Wikipedia, the largest user-generated online encyclopedia. These data allow them to track all three elements required to test Coleman’s mechanism: norm violations, punishments for such violations, and rewards for those who punish violations. The results support Coleman’s mechanism.

The Paradox of Novice Contributions to Collective Production: Evidence from Wikipedia

This study uses the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to examine the links between expert producers of collective goods, demand for such goods, and good quality. Since collective production settings lack a price-like mechanism, producers do not have direct information about demand for goods so they may fail to produce goods that are needed. In this study I identify a social mechanism through which producers receive, and respond to information about consumer needs across a set of heterogeneous collectively produced goods. Using a longitudinal dataset of 187 million contributions to Wikipedia articles and article demand between October 2008 and February 2009, I model the contributions of novice and expert producers to article quality, and evaluate the relationship between consumer need and novice and expert contributions. Findings show that novice contributors have a direct negative effect on good quality, but their participation in producing a good motivates experts to contribute and increase the quality of the good, thus mediating the relationship between need for goods and expert contributions. These results provide evidence that collective goods fail to satisfy consumer needs in the absence of direct information from consumers, and highlight the paradoxical role of novices in providing a cue about these needs.

Structural sampling: A technique for illuminating social systems

In this chapter, we argue that combining different qualitative research methods can facilitate the study of collective cognition in organizations, thus compensating the limitations of more traditional approaches. Using our own research experience in studying how designers develop new ideas, we explain how the combined use of ethnography, grounded theory and visual narrative analysis allowed us to gain a deep understanding of how material practices influence collective cognitive sensemaking in organizations. In particular, we show (1) how ethnography allowed us to map and unpack the material practices designers engage in when developing new ideas, (2) how interviews and grounded theory helped us articulate informants’ interpretations of these practices and reveal the underlying cognitive processes, and, finally, (3) how visual narrative analysis was useful to systematically track changes in the evolving collective interpretations, and by doing so to link together practices and processes in a longitudinal fashion.In this chapter we discuss a sampling technique that has been employed in recent works, but has yet to be delineated as a distinct methodology: “structural sampling.” Structural sampling allows the investigator to illuminate the inner-workings of a social system by interviewing actors in a variety of roles and making comparisons across multiple levels of analysis. We describe the technique of structural sampling and its purpose, elucidate the benefits and challenges of structural sampling, provide several examples to illustrate potential uses of this technique, and situate structural sampling in the context of extant qualitative research methodologies.