Chapter Summaries

      Part I Introduction

      1 The Duality of Peer Production: Infrastructure for the Digital Commons, Free Labor for Free‐Riding Firms

       Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin, & Christian Pentzold

      This introductory chapter examines a series of productive tensions located in and around peer production: we interrogate the meaning of peer‐to‐peer infrastructure models and find that some forms of peer infrastructure have thrived, whilst others were effectively banned. We review Yochai Benkler’s influential theorization of “commons‐based peer production,” and ask to what extent it embodies Western, first‐world assumptions. We evaluate the relationship of peer production to the dominant economy, considering the rich scholarship on peer production’s transformational potential, which was inspired by Benkler’s model and is often imbued with utopian overtones. At the same time peer infrastructure plays a central role in the digital economy, and we critically examine political economy understandings which hold that peer production has been recuperated by capitalism and enabled new forms of labor exploitation. We also analyze the organizational form which facilitated the emergence of hybridization between commercial firms and communal projects, outline the aims of this Handbook, and summarize its structure and content.

Part II Concepts: Explaining Peer Production

      2 Grammar of Peer Production

       Vasilis Kostakis & Michael Bauwens

      In 2005, Michel Bauwens published The Political Economy of Peer Production, which discussed the principles, characteristics, and the future of the then nascent ecosystem of peer production. This chapter revisits Bauwens’ 2005 article, adopting, expanding, and refining the operational concepts – or “grammar” – he used to define peer‐production projects and the institutional ecosystems that sustain them. Our aim is to provide a framework that would give a theoretical underpinning to the transformative practices of peer production. In a time of deep environmental, social and political crisis, it is important to understand how a new kind of society, based on the centrality of the commons and within a reformed market and state, is possible. This chapter, thus, discusses and introduces new paradigmatic ways of value creation that have the potential to be more radically inclusive and sustainable.

      3 Political Economy of Peer Production

       Benjamin J. Birkinbine

      This chapter provides a framework for understanding the political economy of peer production. As such, I interrogate the intersection of peer production and capitalism along two axes. First, I contextualize the rise of peer production within broader structural changes occurring within capitalism and evaluate the extent to which peer production contradicts, or reinforces, these global economic trends. Second, I draw from more recent theories of commons value circuits to position peer production as dialectically situated between capital and the commons, which highlights the ways in which communities of peer producers intersect with circuits of capital accumulation. The question I explore in the latter part of the chapter is whether the emergent cultural practices within peer production have the capability to subvert the prevailing tendencies of capitalism and offer a path toward a post‐capitalist future.

      4 Social Norms and Rules in Peer Production

       Christian Pentzold

      The regulation of peer‐production projects is achieved by the users themselves. These forms of self‐organization and self‐management depend on shared social norms and have generated, in turn, sets of rules. Some of them characterize the larger population of peer‐production projects; others seem to be an attribute of particular projects. The chapter provides an overview and comparison of peer production’s signature norms and rules, it traces their origins and describes their implications for collaboration and editorial work.

      5 Cultures of Peer Production

       Michael Stevenson

      How can we make sense of cultures of peer production, which exist in diverse national, cultural, and language contexts, span several industries and domains, and comprise a range of different organizational structures? To set the groundwork for such an understanding, this chapter argues that it is necessary to see that peer production is, by and large, a form of cultural production, and thus bears structural similarities to existing cultural fields like art, literature, and journalism. The chapter shows how (1) peer‐production projects are clearly embedded in existing cultural fields, and often represent an autonomous form of production that seeks to resist certain economic and political pressures in favor of core values such as meritocracy and openness and (2) such autonomy is achieved through the enactment of those core values, which are in turn related to the social hierarchies, forms of exclusion, and other limitations that characterize these projects and the groups of people who populate them.

      6 Commons‐Based Peer Production and Virtue (reprint)

       Helen Nissenbaum & Yochai Benkler

Commons‐based peer production is a socio‐economic system of production that is emerging in the digitally networked environment. Facilitated by the technical infrastructure of the Internet, the hallmark of this socio‐technical system is collaboration among large groups of individuals, sometimes in the order of tens or even hundreds of thousands, who cooperate effectively to provide information, knowledge, or cultural goods without relying on either market pricing or managerial hierarchies to coordinate their common enterprise. While there