Collective Action, Institutionalism, and the Internet

摘要

With increasing emphasis on the informational aspects of the economy, there are calls for the reform of existing institutions and related policy changes to maximize economic efficiency and to foster equitable distribution of the benefits of "knowledge economies." Frequently those who propose new institutional solutions are fascinated by the pace of technological innovation, so much so that they fail to heed lessons that can be drawn from the various and rich strands of twentieth century institutional economics. In this paper, the focus is on the lacunae in our understanding of the emergence of new institutions for governing the provision of Internet-based business services. The specific services of interest in this paper are those arising from initiatives that seek to develop large-scale distributed open source software applications for use by small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). Although considerable attention is being given to the micro-level practices of communities of software developers in the open source movement in the research literature, insufficient attention is being given to how these actors develop and maintain sustainable relationships with other actors with whom they must interact to introduce viable service innovations. As these relationships develop, new institutions or "working rules"—as John R. Commons might have designated them—begin to emerge to manage the governance requirements for such initiatives.