{"title":"Overcoming resource challenges in peer-production communities through bricolage: The case of HomeNets","authors":"Aljona Zorina","doi":"10.1016/j.infoandorg.2021.100365","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Peer-production communities can create great value and foster innovation for their members, even in situations where resources are extremely scarce. How these communities create or acquire necessary resources in such settings is an important theoretical and practical question. In this paper, I investigate how a peer-production community overcame substantial resource challenges, using the analytic lens of bricolage theory, in a longitudinal study of HomeNets, communities of residents that developed residential Internet infrastructures and services for a million users in Minsk, Belarus, without funds, material resources, knowledge, or formal legal status. The findings illustrate that communities develop their missing resources by engaging in multiple coexisting bricolage forms and processes, which help them to successfully incorporate the individual and collective resource building efforts of their participants and address the challenges specific to the continuously evolving community. Based on the findings, I propose a model of community resource development with bricolage, discuss theoretical and practical implications for studies on communities and bricolage, and suggest areas for further research.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":47253,"journal":{"name":"Information and Organization","volume":"31 3","pages":"Article 100365"},"PeriodicalIF":5.7000,"publicationDate":"2021-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2021.100365","citationCount":"4","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Information and Organization","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1471772721000312","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 4
Abstract
Peer-production communities can create great value and foster innovation for their members, even in situations where resources are extremely scarce. How these communities create or acquire necessary resources in such settings is an important theoretical and practical question. In this paper, I investigate how a peer-production community overcame substantial resource challenges, using the analytic lens of bricolage theory, in a longitudinal study of HomeNets, communities of residents that developed residential Internet infrastructures and services for a million users in Minsk, Belarus, without funds, material resources, knowledge, or formal legal status. The findings illustrate that communities develop their missing resources by engaging in multiple coexisting bricolage forms and processes, which help them to successfully incorporate the individual and collective resource building efforts of their participants and address the challenges specific to the continuously evolving community. Based on the findings, I propose a model of community resource development with bricolage, discuss theoretical and practical implications for studies on communities and bricolage, and suggest areas for further research.
期刊介绍:
Advances in information and communication technologies are associated with a wide and increasing range of social consequences, which are experienced by individuals, work groups, organizations, interorganizational networks, and societies at large. Information technologies are implicated in all industries and in public as well as private enterprises. Understanding the relationships between information technologies and social organization is an increasingly important and urgent social and scholarly concern in many disciplinary fields.Information and Organization seeks to publish original scholarly articles on the relationships between information technologies and social organization. It seeks a scholarly understanding that is based on empirical research and relevant theory.