Hybrid Organisations: a Study of the Open Source – Business Setting
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A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Ciesielska, Malgorzata Doctoral Thesis Hybrid Organisations: A study of the Open Source – business setting PhD Series, No. 32.2010 Provided in Cooperation with: Copenhagen Business School (CBS) Suggested Citation: Ciesielska, Malgorzata (2010) : Hybrid Organisations: A study of the Open Source – business setting, PhD Series, No. 32.2010, ISBN 9788759384466, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Frederiksberg, http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8200 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/208765 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. 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No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Malgorzata Ciesielska Hybrid Organisations A study of the Open Source – business setting 1st edition 2010 PhD Series 32.2010 © The Author ISBN: 978-87-593-8446-6 Hybrid organisations. ISSN: 0906-6934 A study of the Open Source – business setting. The Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies (OMS) is an interdisciplinary research environment at Copenhagen Business School for PhD students working on theoretical and empirical themes related to the organisation and management of private, public and voluntary organisations Malgorzata Ciesielska Department of Organization All rights reserved. Copenhagen Business School No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The essence of software design, like writing of poetry, is a creative process. The role of technology and organization is to liberate that creativity to the greatest extent possible and to facilitate its translation into working code. Neither new technology nor a “better” division of labor can replace the creative essence that drives the project. (Weber, 2004:59) 2 Table of contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS _________________________________________________ 4 ENGLISH SUMMARY _____________________________________________________ 5 DANSK RESUMÉ ________________________________________________________ 9 INTRODUCTION _________________________________________________________ 14 Inspirations __________________________________________________________ 14 Disposition of the thesis _______________________________________________ 16 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ___________________________________________ 18 Institutions and logics _________________________________________________ 20 The outcomes of institutional contradictions _____________________________ 23 Hybridity as an organisatonal phenomenon ______________________________ 25 Derivative forms of hybridity in Internet mediated work environments ________ 29 Towards the Open Source-business hybrid ______________________________ 31 Framework for understanding Open Source-business collaboration _________ 33 METHODOLOGY ________________________________________________________ 38 The ethnography-inspired case study 38 Data sources 39 “Nested” levels of analysis 45 Limitations and quality of data 47 The data analysis 49 REFERENCES ___________________________________________________________ 54 INDIVIDUAL PAPERS ____________________________________________________ 64 PAPER 1. KNOWLEDGE INTEGRATION AND ORGANISATIONAL PRINCIPLES OF AN OPEN SOURCE–BUSINESS HYBRID. PAPER 2. THE TWO-DIMENSIONAL TAXONOMY OF TRUST IN AN OPEN SOURCE–BUSINESS COLLABORATION. PAPER 3. “WE” AND “THEY” IN THE OPEN SOURCE-BUSINESS CONTEXT. 3 Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of a lot of people. First of all, I would like to thank to the Open Source researchers at Copenhagen Business School. To my supervisor Ann Westenholtz, who not only helped me to direct my research and analysis and offered advice on theoretical and methodological issues, but primarily supported me in the process through many of my doubts and despondency. You have raised my spirits, motivated me to work hard and challenged my knowledge. You encouraged me to look deeper in to the data and structure my thoughts better to overcome inconsistencies in my arguments. To Gregers Petersen, who has helped me to get acquainted with the Open Source and always initiated interesting discussions and offered inspiration for my research. To Silvia Gherardi, Stephen Gudeman, Tor Hernes, Kristian Kreiner, Maurizio Teli, and Elke Weik for all your comments on my project and writings. You gave me constructive feedback on my emerging dissertation and helped to move it further. I would also like to thank to the entire Department of Organisation at Copenhagen Business School. This has been a wonderful three years in an encouraging, challenging but also extremely friendly and supportive working environment. I am also grateful to Ari Jaaksi, vice-president of Nokia who enable me an access to Nokia premises and employees. I owe special thanks to all informants and interviewees, which helped me gathering data for this dissertation. We agreed for anonymity, so I don’t mention you by names. To GNOME and Maemo communities for intellectually challenging talks and wonderful time I spend with you. Without your patience and willingness to explain to me the specificity of your work, I wouldn’t be able to understand what you are struggling with. I also deeply appreciate the Velux Foundation’s financial support, which enabled me to conduct the study in various places and participate in many meetings and conferences. Finally, my deepest gratitude for my family and friends who supported me the whole way through my PhD. Without you, I wouldn’t have completed it! 4 English summary Hybrid organisations: a study of the Open Source – business setting. This research project examines how the conflicting institutional logics are dealt with in a hybrid organisational form. The empirical setting of the study is an Open Source – business collaboration in software development projects. The idea of making a case study of the Open Source – business collaboration is interesting from both theoretical and business perspectives. Since companies realised that the world’s most talented people are distributed throughout various organisations, rather than members of a single team or corporation, the open innovation model could be neither underestimated nor ignored by the business. However, that solution brings new challenges, especially for business-oriented organisations. The challenges come from the significant differences between new open models and the classic closed-innovation model, which grew on the concept of the institution of the intellectual property rights. Open Source, on the contrary, is intrinsically an anti-corporational, pro-knowledge-sharing and creativity motivated movement. As a result, in the era of open collaboration in knowledge-integrating platforms the everyday problems are constituted of dealing with mixture of institutional backgrounds, business models and professional identities. The literature on Open Source - business opportunities concentrates on how Open Source ideals are different from pure business orientation and how this may change general relations within projects. However, too much attention is put on anonymity and self-regulating coordination mechanisms, where many projects