infonet-economy

This special issue of Research Policy is dedicated to new research on the phenomenon of open source software development. Open Source, because of its novel modes of operation and robust functioning in the marketplace, poses novel and fundamental questions for researchers in many fields, ranging from the economics of innovation to the principles by which productive work can best be organized. In this introduction to the special issue, we provide a general history and description of open source software and open source software development processes, plus an overview of the articles.

Currently, two models of innovation are prevalent in organization science. The "private investment" model assumes returns to the innovator result from private goods and efficient regimes of intellectual property protection. The "collective action" model assumes that under conditions of market failure, innovators collaborate in order to produce a public good. The phenomenon of open source software development shows that users program to solve their own as well as shared technical problems, and freely reveal their innovations without appropriating private returns from selling the software. In this paper, we propose that open source software development is an exemplar of a compound "private-collective" model of innovation that contains elements of both the private investment and the collective action models and can offer society the "best of both worlds" under many conditions. We describe
a new set of research questions this model raises for scholars in organization science. We offer some details regarding the types of data available for open source projects in order to ease access for researchers who are unfamiliar with these, and also offer some advice on conducting empirical studies on open source software development processes.

This paper develops an inductive theory of the open source software (OSS) innovation process by focussing on the creation of Freenet, a project aimed at developing a decentralized and anonymous peer-to-peer electronic file sharing network. We are particularly interested in the strategies and processes by which new people join the existing community of software developers, and how they initially contribute code. Analyzing data from multiple sources on the Freenet software development process, we generate the constructs of "joining script", "specialization", "contribution barriers", and "feature gifts", and propose relationships among these. Implications for theory and research are discussed.

This symposium focuses on the role of inter-organizational power in strategy formation. Power relations between organizations have been foundational themes in strategy (Child, 1972; MacMillan, 1978; Mintzberg, 1983; Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978; Porter, 1980). Scholars and strategy practitioners alike have sought to understand how to position a company so as to gain and defend market power (Porter, 1980), how to prevail in disruptive innovation and change (Tushman & Anderson, 1986), how to deal with important resource-holders (e.g. Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978) and stakeholders (Freeman, 1984), how to influence or shape regulation and legislation (Keim & Zeithaml, 1986), how to settle inter-organizational conflicts (Helms, Oliver, & Webb, 2012), and how and when to compete or to collaborate with competitors (Ingram & Yue, 2008). In these and other situations, perspectives on inter-organizational politics and power - also referred to as "macro power" (Mintzberg et al., 2005) - are decisive for understanding and explaining organizational and inter-organizational outcomes.

The purpose of the symposium therefore is to present and to critically evaluate some of the major theoretical perspectives on inter-organizational power as applied to strategy and management.

Analyzing the change of organizational routines in a public health care organization, this paper contributes to a better understanding of how organizational routines change when a network of interconnected routines is affected by a change initiative. We focus on the role of reflexivity (Feldman, 2000) and individual as well as collective agency (Howard-Grenville, 2005) in different stages of the change process. We identify the establishment of reflection routines as a key success factor for implementing routine change and enabling continuous adaptation of organizational routines. The process of "routinizing reflection" that we observe in our empirical case explains how collective reflection becomes established within an organization and how it drives the change of organizational routines not only as temporary episodic change but as a basis for ongoing continuous adaptation of routines.

Based on a longitudinal case study of a change initiative in a nursing department, we explore the question of how to embed paradox solutions. Drawing on routine dynamics our study shows the emergence of reflective routines as both a medium and part of the outcome to handle a paradox. The establishment of reflective routines moves from individual observing, through repeated interaction, resonance with both poles of the paradox, towards embedding reflective routines formally while differentiating them in terms of topics, participants and temporal rhythm. Thereby, reflective routines overcome the separation between designers and implementers of paradox solutions and become an integral part to daily organizing within the studied organizational unit.