Most of the blog is derived from Chapter 13 “Labor and/as Love: Exploring the Commons of Roller Derby” by David Fagundes, in the book ‘Governing Knowledge Commons’ ed Frischmann, Madison, Strandburg.
The central question in a great deal of neoliberal theory concerns ‘incentives’. What motivates people to do work? This is relevant when considering the governance and management of any commons, but especially knowledge commons. How and why to people create by using a shared/common body of knowledge and a small community.
Daniel Pink in his book ‘Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us’ suggests that extrinsic rewards – like money are very good incentives for motivating us when work is menial and repetitive. However the same research indicates that motivation for creative thinking and work – extrinsic rewards not on fails to produce better creations but can actually degrade the creative solutioning.
The basic model of cost-benefit calculus assumes that work is a means to an end. This model does not work for any work we would consider a ‘labor of love’ – where the work is the reward – the process is the ends.
Research seeking to understand human motivations beyond a cost-benefit framework suggest at least three factors inspiring the labors of love.
1 – Autonomy. People are more likely to work well in situations where they believe they are choosing to work rather than having to work or are coerced into work.
2 – Mastery and Effectiveness. When people have work that enables a sense of achieving efficacy and mastery they will tend to enact more diligence and feel more satisfaction.
3 – Purpose. When people feel connected to a greater good or goal that they believe in they will be more motivated – regardless of extrinsic reward.
Understanding that work can be a labor of love helps to resolve problems of why anyone would participate in creating and governing a commons – especially one involving knowledge, culture and community. Such ‘commons work’ is often not seen as drudgery – rather it can be felt as a service and a source of joy.
The concept of a labor of love helps us understand the importance and vitality of the rise of a commons. People mostly participate in a commons – NOT for the promise of a big pile of money or fame. They are generally inspired by the ability to create a space within which they can exercise their autonomy, controlling the development of what they care about, and having a sense of purpose beyond themselves – becoming a part of something larger.
These researchers begin with an understanding that entrepreneurial motivations are generally coproduced with a number of factors – including contextual variables like the state of technology and the complexity of social and institutional structures.
To simplify their analysis they build upon a framework of four modes of individual and community complexity. They name these modes:
The Inventor Mode,
The Community Mode,
The Network Exchange Mode, and
The Commercial Mode.
Each mode represents distinct social structures associated with the innovation. Each mode fulfills different purposes in relations to the development and diffusion of innovation and serves unique types of participation with others. Each mode is constructed by participants as needs change and the innovation develops – they need not evolve in any particular order.
The Inventor Mode
In this mode there is only a single or small group of ‘inventors’ and generally no social structure involved. The individual or group tend to use their own resources and are focused on a particular problem or interest in developing something they see a need for. They are led to make efforts on innovation through prior technologies and innovations.
The Community Mode
In this mode a larger group (perhaps less than 50) of ‘modifiers’ have contacted the original innovators because they have taken up the original effort/innovation to replicate and use it. This mode becomes real as modifiers begin to well modify-innovate upon the original innovation through establishing connections amongst all participants. Almost all members are both users and producers of the innovation helping new members build their own versions.
Many inventions/innovations never transition into community mode. Community is challenging and thankless work. A key challenge can be the diluting of control over the original innovation. Some will want to move quickly to transition into a commercialization of the innovation. Others will want to establish standardization which can lead to a transition to a ‘Network Exchange Mode’.
The Network Exchange Mode
Not all members of the community mode want to build their own version and seek to find a member who can build all or some of the innovation. Some members of the community offer to build kits. When this starts to happen it represents a shifting to network exchange mode.
While this mode embodies features of both industry/commercialization and community mode it is also significantly different than both. The network exchange mode requires that the innovation be sufficiently easy to replicate and use. However, no one is able to make a living building kits or copies for new users or even to provide full versions. Often new members don’t even pay for their kits or parts they receive.
The Commercial Mode
This is perhaps the most familiar mode, when firms are created to sell the innovation to consumers without the time, skill or interest in making/building their own. In thins mode almost all new members/users are consumers whose relationships with producers are transactional. The innovation has developed to the point where it is attractive to consumers – offering reliable and user-friendly service. There is often plenty of consumers who are capable of modifying to customize the innovation to their own use.
This mode is characterized with standardization of design and use in order to achieve economies of scale and scope.
Considerations
In the journey of innovation from invention to community to network-exchange and commercialization development has to include the costs of the learning curve and include the work necessary to establish community-consumer literacy and knowledge for the innovation to be implemented as a product.
There are so many ways to think about how things are connected.
And other ways to think about how connected thing enact the relationships afforded by being connected
Thinking about the graphic below – a conventional mapping of centralized, decentralized and distributed networks
A self-evidently more accurate way of understanding the three network graphs above – would start with Centralized – a self-evident hub-spoke centralized configuration.
The middle graph named ‘Decentralized’ should be renamed Polycentric – as it it self-evidently a collection loosely linked smaller hub-and-spokes – thus polycentric configuration.
The third graph – called distributed, seems to be what is self-evidently truly decentralized – with no evident hub-center or spoke since all nodes connected to all neighbor nodes. Thus decentralized (literally no centers) and distributed seem to be the same thing.
A key re-cognition is that a society is self governing to the degree that all three network forms serve for the flourishing of that society. Democracies are complex living societies where all individuals can become ‘entangled’ within diversities that ‘group-forming’ freedoms enable (the freedom of association – the free coordinating of relationships)
Democracies are also complex living systems to the degree that resources of the whole are distributed to all the cells for their flourishing and thus in order for the whole to flourish as greater than the whole of all the ecologies of cells.
There are polycentric levels of self-organization and niche functioning:
levels of government – federal, provincial, municipal
levels in private sector – monopoly, franchise, partnership, cooperative, non-profit, etc.
levels in civil society – religious, charities, clubs, leagues, associations,
In a democracy any individual can participate in a diversity of network structures and governance regimes – sometime simultaneously.
Trinity of Institutional Domains
The graph below comes from Henry Mintzberg which inspired some of the reasoning above. Because in a democracy an individual can participate in all three domains simultaneously.
We The People – are entangled in the whole. Each domain entails corresponding institutions related to the capacity to organize people to get things done.
Of course there are many ways people can organize themselves to get things done. Gerard Fairtlough, who worked for Shell for 25 years – the last 5 of which he served as Chief Executive of Shell Chemicals UK, wrote a wonderful book called: “The Three Ways of Getting Things Done”. He summarized these three ways.
In democracies every person is afforded the freedoms and response-abilities – to participate with fluency in all three ways of getting things done.
Central-Hierarchy –
Polycentric-Heterarchy –
Distributed-Decentralized-Responsible-Autonomy
Whether it is a private or public sector organization – hierarchy is everywhere – it’s the ‘chain of command’.
In modern city-suburban life there numerous organizations and networks – Mintzberg’s plurals, and thus is a ubiquitous experience of polycentricity.
In a democracy – every individual is afforded the freedom of response-able autonomy.
Now we can re-imagine how we could structure organizations to enable and incentivize response-able innovation within the organization and for the organization.
Very simply, let’s imagine we give managers ‘ownership’ of only 70% of employees paid worktime. Their budget of employee time to achieve expected outcomes would of course be correspondingly adjusted.
Then give the executive ownership of 15% of employee paid work time. This enable executive special actions, tasks to be resources more quickly and fluidly.
The give individuals ownership of 15% of their paid work time. Individual’s would a variety of ways to allocate this portion of their time – from individual and/or collective learning opportunities to inventive collaborative project-tinkering. This is the very means that enabled the invention of the post-it note (love or hate it). A collection of 3M employees self-organized around a question of how to do something useful with a glue that was bad at sticking.
Another way of framing of ‘Responsible Autonomy’ comes from the work of Barry Wellman and Lee Rainy in their book “Networked: The New Social Operating System”. In the book they use the term ‘Networked Individualism’ to describe the condition of being a person in the digital environment.
Both networked-individualism and responsible-autonomy frame the human individual as embodied-embedded in a social context. This is a more accurate frame than the ubiquitous assumptions of neoliberal economics, evident in claims such as Margaret Thatcher’s view that there is no such thing as society, rather there are only individuals. And of course, such individuals are best considered: as atomistic, isolated, and selfish.
One more important thinker to add to this brief account of the structures available to ‘get things done’ is Yaneer Bar Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute. In his analysis of complex systems he provides further grounding to Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. Bar Yam situates complex systems in contexts of their environment.
Briefly he notes that any system that can not match the external complexity of the environment with it’s own internal complexity will become overwhelmed by their environment. Thus, internal complexity is a requisite ability to match environmental complexity if the system is going to flourish in a changing environment.
This is an important concept in understanding the vulnerability of hierarchic centralized systems and even of distributed systems. In a centralized-hierarchic system – control comes from the top-center. This means that the capacity to generate response-able complexity to changing environments is limited by the ‘command-control-center’. Thus the capabilities of the command-control centralized hierarchy represents the ‘ceiling’ of it capacity to access it’s own complexity in order to generate responsive adaptation to its environment. The slide below is illustrative of the threshold of internal and external complexity for survival and flourishing
And below we see the dangers of centralized hierarchy of command-control – a complexity ceiling of a single center of command.
Yaneer Bar Yam provides an historical view of an evolving complex society.
The above illustration suggests that complex societies are more able to flourishing in complex environment because they can access a capacity to explore and generate more response-able possibilities. Complex societies are polycentric, diverse and evolve-able.
It is self-evident that human are fundamentally social – becoming human through the technologies of language and culture. Humans shape technology and technology shape humans.
We live in times of profound change in conditions of change which will require a re-imagining of how we govern ourselves to enable the flourishing of all.
The ‘We-the-People’ of a democracy must provision ourselves the means to connect as we choose to participate in various ways of getting things done. ‘We-the-People’ must also ensure we provision ourselves with the means to attain and enact a fluency of agency no matter the network-structure, sector of society, way of getting things done.
Every social-collective effort has rules, rules about changing the rules, and rules about policing the rules. Every democracy must provision all its people with the means that enable agency and response-ability to play in the rules and to contribute to changing the rules should experience and evidence call for change.
We-the-people are free when we collectively provision a healthy ecology of diverse conditions for each and all to participate in a spectrum of way with a spectrum of motivations.
The ecologies of contexts where fluency and agency afford a rich well discovered life – like from playing tennis in the morning, soccer in the afternoon, chess in evening, and then playing in a late-night band.
