[ecrea] CFP - Journal of Peer Production: Work and Peer Production

CFP Journal of Peer Production: Work and peer production
Editors: Phoebe Moore (Middlesex University London), Mathieu O’Neil
(University of Canberra), Stefano Zacchiroli (University Paris Diderot)

The rise in the usage and delivery capacity of the Internet in the 1990s
has led to the development of massively distributed online projects
where self-governing volunteers collaboratively produce public goods.
Notable examples include Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects
such as Debian and GNOME, as well as the Wikipedia encyclopedia. These
distributed practices have been characterised as peer production,
crowdsourcing, mass customization, social production, co-configurative
work, playbour, user-generated content, wikinomics, open innovation,
participatory culture, produsage, and the wisdom of the crowd, amongst
other terms. In peer production, labour is communal and outputs are
orientated towards the further expansion of the commons, an ecology of
production that aims to defy and resist the hierarchies and rules of
ownership that drive productive models within capitalism (Moore, 2011);
while the commons, recursively, are the chief resource in this mode of
production (Söderberg & O’Neil, 2014).

Peer projects are ‘ethical’ as participation is primarily motivated by
self-fulfillment and validated by a community of peers, rather than by
earning wages. Their governance is ‘modular’, understood in a design
sense (decomposable blocks sharing a common interface), but also in
political-economy terms: participants oppose restricted ownership and
control by individually socializing their works into commons.
Conflicting interpretations of their societal impact have been
articulated (O’Neil, 2015). Skeptics view the abjuration of exclusive
property rights over the goods they produce as irrelevant, and
ethical-modular projects as increasing worker exploitation:
participants’ passionate labour occurs at the expense of less fortunate
others, who do not have the disposable income, cultural capital, or
family support to engage in unpaid labour (Moore & Taylor, 2009; Huws,
2013). In contrast, reformists, often hailing from a management
perspective, suggest that the co-optation of communal labour by firms
will improve business practices and society (Arvidsson, 2008; Demil et
al., 2015). Finally activists celebrate the abjuration of exclusive
property rights, and present ethical-modular projects as key actors in a
historical process leading to the supersession of capitalism and
hierarchy (Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014).

This last perspective raises a central challenge, which is the avoidance
of purely utopian thinking. In other words, how can commons-based peer
production reach deeply into daily life? How can ‘already existing
non-capitalist economic processes’ be strengthened, ‘new non-capitalist
enterprises’ be built, and ‘communal subjects’ be established
(Gibson-Graham, 2003: 157)? An increasingly large free public goods and
services sector could well cohabit in a plural economy with employment
in cooperatives, paid independent work, and the wage-earning of the
commercial sector. However analysis of peer production typically eschews
mundane considerations such as living wages, benefits, job security,
working conditions, work-induced medical conditions, and debates on
labour organization. How can peer production operate as a sustainable
practice enabling people to live, if labour and work issues are not
formally addressed?

To advance this agenda, the tenth issue of the Journal of Peer
Production, titled Peer Production and Work, calls for papers in two
linked areas:

*Peer production in a paid work society*
Nowadays firms attempt to monetize crowdsourced labour. The paradigmatic
example is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk labourers (popularly known as
‘Turkers’, ‘cloud workers’ or ‘click workers’) who accomplish
micro-tasks such as tagging and labeling images, transcribing audio or
video recordings, and categorizing products. This extreme modularization
of work results in their status being that of independent contractors
rather than employees with rights, necessitating novel means of
protection and redress (Irani & Silberman, 2013). The so-called 'sharing
economy' also uses peer production methods, such as the self-selection
of modular and granular tasks, to extract ever-more value from the
labour of volunteer ‘prosumers’ (Frayssé & O’Neil, 2015). Capitalist
firms are also increasingly engaging with ethical-modular organizations,
in some cases paying wages to participants. Such labour is thus both
‘alienated’, or sold, and ‘communal’, as workers freely cooperate to
produce commons. Do traditional categories such as exploitation and
alienation still apply?
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Peer production and the global political economy
- Peer production and the rise of precarious work
- Peer workers and possibilities for worker organisation
- Does the autonomy of peer workers cause conflict in firms, and how is
it resolved?
- What strategies do firms adopt to co-opt peer production (e.g.,
‘hackhathons’)?
- Do tensions around property rights emerge?
- Subjectivity in peer production
- Peer production and intellectual property, coded work

*Paid work in peer production projects*
How does paid labour affect ethical P2P projects? Mansell and Berdou
(2010) argue that firms supporting the work of programmers who
contribute to volunteer projects, to the commons, will not affect the
‘cooperative spirit’ of projects; nor can this support prevent the
results of labour from being socialized into commons. Is this always the
case?
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- How do peer projects deal with the presence of paid or waged labour?
- Is this topic discussed within peer production projects? In what way?
- What benefits do paid or waged workers enjoy in peer projects?
- How does paid labour affect peer production projects?

*Timeline*
300-500 word-abstract due: 30 July 2015
Notification to authors: 30 August 2015
Submission of full paper: 31 December 2015
Reviews to authors: 15 February 2016
Revised papers: 30 April 2016
Signals due: 30 May 2016
Issue release: June/July 2016

*Submission guidelines*
Submission abstracts of 300-500 words are due by July 30, 2015 and
should be sent to <(work /at/ peerproduction.net)>. All peer reviewed papers
will be reviewed according to Journal of Peer Production guidelines. See
http://peerproduction.net/peer-review/process/
Full papers and materials are due by December 31, 2015 for review.
Peer reviewed papers should be around 8,000 words; personal testimonies
or ‘tales of toil’ in the Processed World tradition should be up to
4,000 words.

*References*
Arvidsson, A. (2008). The ethical economy of consumer coproduction.
Journal of Macromarketing, 8, 326-338.

Demil, B., Lecoq. X. & Warnier, E. (2015). The capabilities of bazaar
governance: Investigating the advantage of business models based on open
communities. Journal of Organizational Change Management, in press.

Frayssé, O. & O’Neil, M. (2015) Digital labour and prosumer capitalism:
The US matrix. Basingstoke: Palgrave, in press.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2003). Enabling ethical economies: Cooperativism
and class. Critical Sociology, 29, 123-164.

Huws, U. (2013). The underpinnings of class in the digital age: Living,
labour and value. Socialist Register, 50, 80-107.

Irani, L. & Silberman, M. (2013). Turkopticon: Interrupting worker
invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk. Proceedings of the SIGCHI
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Kostakis, V. & Bauwens, M. (2014) Network society and future scenarios
for a collaborative economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Mansell, R. & Berdou, E. (2010). Political economy, the internet and
FL/OSS development. In Hunsinger, J., Allen, M. & Klastrup, L. (Eds.)
International handbook of Internet research (pp. 341-362). Amsterdam,
The Netherlands: Springer.

Moore, P. (2011). Subjectivity in the ecologies of P2P Production. The
Journal of Fibreculture FCJ-119. Online.

Moore, P. & Taylor, P. A. (2009). Exploitation of the self in
community-based software production: Workers’ freedoms or firm
foundations? Capital & Class, 99-117.

O’Neil, M. (2015). Labour out of control: The political economy of
capitalist and ethical organizations. Organization Studies, 1-21.

Söderberg, J. & O’Neil, M. (2014). 'Introduction'. Book of Peer
Production (pp. 2-3). Göteborg: NSU Press.

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