"Virtual Collective Production: Questions, Pitfalls and Possibilities for Organization Theory"
Glenn R. Carroll · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2014
Over the past decade, technological advances have enabled large numbers of individuals to combine efforts towards producing (often public) goods online. Witness the rise of websites that thrive by aggregating incremental contributions from a disparate population to produce a myriad of offerings such as knowledge in the case of Wikipedia (Gorbatai 2014), restaurant reviews as in the case of Yelp (Kovacs et al 2013, 2014), book reviews such as Goodreads (Kovacs and Sharkey 2014), or even consumer loans in the case of Prosper (Leung and Sharkey 2013). In this symposium we suggest that these virtual collective production developments have implications for organizational theories regarding producers and consumers. Research into this phenomenon seems to have lagged behind its prevalence. This symposium seeks to demonstrate that collective production is a social concept worthy of both novel theorizing and capable of informing traditional streams of literature. In order to do so, this symposium asks: Why do people participate in the collective production of public goods? How do these forums affect organizations? And how valid are the inferences we derive from these settings? In doing so, we draw attention to the pitfalls of ignoring the social aspects of participation in social production (Gorbatai; Leung and Wang), the heterogeneity of participating producers (Verhaal), and the biases underlining the decision to participate in production (Kovacs). Using Online Reviews for Management Research: Should Researchers Worry About Self-selection? Presenter: Balazs Kovacs; U. of Lugano How Controversy Drives Novelty in the Collective Production of Movie Reviews Presenter: Ming D. Leung; U. of California, Berkeley Presenter: Jue Wang; Renmin U. of China Allocation of Expert Attention in Collective Production: Evidence from Wikipedia Presenter: Andreea Daniela Gorbatai; U. of California, Berkeley