Philipp Tuertscher

Research Note---Mapping the Field of Virtual Work: A Cocitation Analysis

Interest in the area of virtual work continues to increase with articles being written from different disciplinary perspectives---e.g., information systems (IS), management, psychology, and transportation. In this paper, we map research on virtual work to (a) understand the intellectual base from which this field has emerged, (b) explore how this field has evolved over time, and (c) identify clusters of research themes that have emerged over time and the relationships between them. Specifically, we use cocitation analysis of research published in all social science disciplines to map the field at three points in time---1995, 2000, and 2006. Our results show that the field has grown from 9 research clusters in 1995 to 16 in 2006. A comparison across these maps suggests that research in the cluster of “virtual teams” has gained significance even as research in some earlier clusters such as “urban planning and transportation” has lost ground. Our longitudinal analysis identifies relevant concepts, theories, and methodologies that have emerged in the field of virtual work. This analysis can help interested researchers identify how they may want to contribute to the field of virtual work---by adding to popular clusters, by enriching emerging smaller clusters, or by acting as bridges across clusters.

Justification and Interlaced Knowledge at ATLAS, CERN

We report on a longitudinal study of the emergence of the ATLAS detector, a complex technological system developed at CERN, Geneva. Our data show that the coordination of initial architectural choices was driven by cycles of contestation and justification that resulted in the creation of what we term interlaced knowledge-pockets of shared knowledge interwoven within and across subsystem communities at ATLAS. We also found that these justifications were possible because of the presence of a boundary infrastructure that served as a common substrate of knowledge for all ATLAS participants. Together, the boundary infrastructure and interlaced knowledge enabled participants to make co-oriented technological choices, address latent interdependencies, and minimize the incidence and severity of glitches when integrating the various subsystems.

The Atlas Collaboration: A Distributed Problem-Solving Network in Big Science

The nature of the problem tackled by the ATLAS collaboration - the creation of a radically innovative particle detector experiment - makes ATLAS an exceptional case for studying DPSNs. The problem solving is distributed across multiple groups of problem solvers comprising 2000 scientists in 165 working groups across the globe. Similarly, the engineering, construction and installation of the many components is distributed across this collaborative network. The initially surprising finding of the case study is that this joint innovation effort succeeded despite breaking with most rules of traditional project management. Philipp Tuertscher analyzes what it took to make such a loosely structured organization work, and raises the question if such structure was even required to develop a complex technological system like the ATLAS detector?

The seven IP commandments of a crowdsourcing community: How self-organized norms-based IP systems overcome imitation problems

In crowdsourcing communities, thousands of users reveal their ideas in order to get feedback, obtain assistance and suggestions for further refinement, and eventually win the endorsement of their fellow voters in the course of the tournament. All this is in done conditions that maximize the risk of theft and imitation. The intangible online setting with anonymous users from heterogeneous cultural backgrounds, and the absence of effective law-based IP protection encourage opportunistic behavior. Thus we should observe frequent violations of intellectual property, and in anticipation of this, only limited participation. However, in stark contrast to this, we observe that crowdsourcing communities flourish. We study this puzzle in the large and particularly successful Threadless community. Our core finding is that the viability of this crowdsourcing community is facilitated by a self-organized informal system of norms that governs the behavior of participants. We describe the system?s elements, namely seven core norms, their interplay and functioning, document its impressive effectiveness, and explore why participants adhere to it. Overall, the view of a community emerges in which people respect IP and adhere to the norms system because they feel it is morally just the right thing to do. Jelcodes:M10,K49

Keeping goals relevant in multi-actor collaborations

This paper explores how organizations from different backgrounds are able to pursue sustained collaboration on a broad goal. Broad goals are effective for mobilizing heterogeneous actors to collabo...

IP Norms in Online Communities: How User-Organized Intellectual Property Regulation Supports Innovation

In many online communities, users reveal innovative and potentially valuable intellectual property (IP) under conditions that entail the risk of theft and imitation. When there is rivalry and formal IP law is not effective, this would lead to underinvestment or withholding of IP – unless user-organized norms compensate for these shortcomings. In exploring the characteristics and functioning of such a norms-based IP system in the setting of anonymous, large-scale, and loose-knit online communities for the first time, we use data on the Threadless crowdsourcing community obtained through netnography, a survey, and a field experiment. On this basis, we identify an integrated system of well-established norms that regulate the use of IP within this community. We analyze the system’s characteristics and functioning, and we find that the “legal certainty” it provides is conducive to cooperation, cumulative effects, and innovation. We discuss the similarities and differences between this norms-based IP system and the corresponding systems in offline communities as well as the key variables determining its remarkable effectiveness, and we provide a contingency view of such systems in online communities. In this way, we not only contribute to the streams of research on norms-based IP systems and online communities, but also offer advice for the management of crowdsourcing communities.

A Model of and for Virtual Projects

We examine how digital technologies enable distributed actors to collaborate asynchronously on virtual projects. We use Wikipedia and associated wiki digital technology as the research site for our exploration. Our probe of the emergence of Wikipedia articles highlights a distinctive property of such digital technologies: in their very use, they generate a digital trace. This digital trace serves as a generative memory that facilitates ongoing cocreation, justification, and materialization of contributions from distributed actors. We examine the implications of such processes for virtual projects that embrace digital technologies with properties similar to the wiki technology used in Wikipedia.