Jacqueline C. Pike

Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy: the nature and roles of policies and rules in wikipedia

Wikis are sites that support the development of emergent, collective infrastructures that are highly flexible and open, suggesting that the systems that use them will be egalitarian, free, and unstructured. Yet it is apparent that the flexible infrastructure of wikis allows the development and deployment of a wide range of structures. However, we find that the policies in Wikipedia and the systems and mechanisms that operate around them are multi-faceted. In this descriptive study, we draw on prior work on rules and policies in organizations to propose and apply a conceptual framework for understanding the natures and roles of policies in wikis. We conclude that wikis are capable of supporting a broader range of structures and activities than other collaborative platforms. Wikis allow for and, in fact, facilitate the creation of policies that serve a wide variety of functions.

Arguing the value of virtual worlds: patterns of discursive sensemaking of an innovative technology

With the rapid pace of technological development, individuals are frequently challenged to make sense of equivocal innovative technology while being given limited information. Virtual worlds are a prime example of such an equivocal innovative technology, and this affords researchers an opportunity to study sensemaking and the construction of perspectives about the organizational value of virtual worlds. This study reports on an analysis of the written assessments of 59 business professionals who spent an extended period of time in Second Life, a popular virtual world, and discursively made sense of the organizational value of virtual worlds. Through a Toulminian analysis of the claims, grounds, and warrants used in the texts they generated, we identify 12 common patterns of sensemaking and indicate that themes of confirmation, open-ended rhetoric, demographics, and control are evident in the different types of claims that were addressed. Further, we assert that the Toulminian approach we employ is a useful methodology for the study of sensemaking and one that is not bound to any particular theoretical perspective.

Dialectic Tensions of Information Quality: Social Networking Sites and Hiring

The hiring process is challenging as the lack of quality information limits the discovery of the true nature of candidates, potentially leading to adverse impacts. Social networking sites (SNSs) have emerged as a potential source for candidate information with more than one billion profiles online. While abundant, the quality of this information for hiring is questionable. Utilizing qualitative interview data, the paper finds issues of quality to be complex as these technologies provide affordances that contradict one another. Tensions within dimensions of information quality were found to consist of dialectic poles: accessibility (open-restricted), contextual (relevant-unsuitable), and intrinsic (reliable-questionable). Understanding these tensions is necessary to explain the nature of perceptions of SNS information quality in the hiring context.

Rules and Roles vs. Consensus Self-Governed Deliberative Mass Collaboration Bureaucracies

Deliberative mass collaboration systems, such as Wikipedia, are characterized as undisciplined, unstructured social spaces where individuals participate in collective action. However, examination of Wikipedia reveals that it contains a bureaucratic structure, which ensures that collective goals are primary drivers of that collective action. To support large-scale activity, deliberative mass collaboration systems must provide ways of reconciling the tension between individual agency and collective goals. Wikipedia’s unusual policy, ignore all rules (IAR), serves as this tension release mechanism. IAR supports individual agency when positions taken by participants might conflict with those reflected in established rules. Hypotheses are tested with Wikipedia data regarding individual agency, bureaucratic processes, and IAR invocation during the content exclusion process. Findings indicate that in Wikipedia each utterance matters in deliberations, rules matter in deliberations, and IAR citation magnifies individual influence but also reinforces bureaucracy.

Handling flammable materials: Wikipedia biographies of living persons as contentious objects

Common ground. Shared interests. Collective goals. Much has been said about the power of technology to bring people together around commonalities to form groups, teams, and communities. Yet, the same technologies can also be used to bring together individuals with fundamentally irreconcilable differences. In these cases, the question is not how to construct systems that build on commonality, but rather how to manage artifacts that by their very nature provide affordances for conflict. In this paper we examine how Biographies of Living Persons (BLP) in Wikipedia exemplify contentious objects, both in terms of their features and their consequences. We draw from discussions of risk management and resilience to outline four approaches that groups can use to manage contentious objects (risk avoidance, risk minimization, threat reduction, and conflict management). Description of the policies, structures, and systems surrounding Biographies of Living Persons in Wikipedia illustrate how application of these approaches enable the creation and existence of large collection of contentions objects, without undermining the viability of the larger socio-technical system.

Keeping eyes on the prize: officially sanctioned rule breaking in mass collaboration systems

Mass collaboration systems are often characterized as unstructured organizations lacking rule and order. However, examination of Wikipedia reveals that it contains a complex policy and rule structure that supports the organization. Bureaucratic organizations adopt workarounds to adjust rules more accurately to the context of use. Rather than resorting to these potentially dangerous exceptions, Wikipedia has created officially sanctioned rule breaking. The use and impact of the official rule breaking policy within Wikipedia is examined to test its impact on the outcomes of requests to delete articles in from the encyclopedia. The results demonstrate that officially sanctioned rule breaking and the Ignore all rules (IAR) policy are meaningful influences on deliberation outcomes, and rather than wreaking havoc, the IAR policy in Wikipedia has been adopted as a positive, functional governance mechanism.

Productivity and Play in Organizations: Executive Perspectives on the Real-World Organizational Value of Immersive Virtual Environments

Abstract In exploring the productive potential of virtual worlds, one relevant line of inquiry is the degree to which immersive online environments can support the objectives of real-world enterprises. Despite the favorable treatment of virtual worlds in the popular and business press, organizations remain cautious in their acceptance and adoption of virtual environments. Since there is a dearth of academic literature on this facet of the virtual world phenomenon, this research aims to provide an assessment of executive perspectives on the potential impact of virtual worlds on businesses and the challenges that may be encountered in organizational application of such environments. To capture business-oriented perceptions of virtual worlds we analyzed, the reports of twenty-five business executives who recently spent considerable time training in and exploring Second Life, a popular online virtual environment. We identify and discuss seven tensions reflected in their assessment of the organizational role o...

Information from social networking sites: Context collapse and ambiguity in the hiring process

Forming impressions of job candidates is a challenging process, one characterized by ambiguity brought about by the uncertainty associated with making decisions and judgments. To reduce ambiguity, hiring professionals have established policies and procedures to facilitate the sourcing and use of information about a candidate. However, recently, a public source of information is increasingly being used—information from social networking sites (SNSs). While conventional wisdom says more information is better and can help make decisions less ambiguous, this relationship may not be as straightforward as expected when facing assessments of candidates. This paper examines two such aspects, information‐task quality and context collapse, and their collective impact on ambiguity when making an assessment of a job candidate. Using data from an online survey‐based experiment, the findings suggest information from SNSs can be useful, yet can create ambiguity for decision makers because of context collapse made possible by SNS technologies.

Overcoming transience and flux: routines in community-governed mass collaborations

Community-governed mass collaborations are virtual organizations in which volunteers self-organize to produce content of value. Given the high turnover of participants and the continual development and modification of governance modules, questions arise about how mass collaborations can succeed. Based on organizational routine theory, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how different aspects of routines can support the goals of mass collaborations.,Proposed hypotheses are developed and tested with data from a critical decision-making area of a successful community-governed mass collaboration – Wikipedia’s content review process.,The findings support the arguments that routines that reinforce governance serve important roles in enabling mass collaboration in the presence of transient participation and dynamic task demands in addition to creating a greater likelihood of success as outlined by the collaboration.,One limitation of this study is that it examines these types of routines in only one context, Wikipedia’s content review process, and Wikipedia is an unusually successful, community-governed mass collaboration. However, this can be considered a conservative test as mass collaborations in more formal contexts or in traditional organizations face fewer hurdles due to more stable social norms, routines, and participant populations.,Greater understanding of how community-governed mass collaborations “get the work done” in spite of participant transience and governance flux can guide developers in managing flourishing communities.,While routines have been studied in traditional organizations, little work has been done with routines in community-governed mass collaborations and how they enable both stability and flexibility.