IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ajecsc/v70y2011i4p928-950.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Open Source Software Production, Spontaneous Input, and Organizational Learning

Author

Listed:
  • GIAMPAOLO GARZARELLI
  • RICCARDO FONTANELLA

Abstract

This work shows that the modular organization of voluntary Open Source Software (OSS) production, whereby programmers supply effort of their accord, capitalizes more on division than on specialization of labor. This is so because voluntary OSS production is characterized by an organizational learning process that dominates the individual one. Organizational learning reveals production choices that would otherwise remain unknown, thereby increasing productivity and indirectly reinforcing incentives to undertake collective problem solving.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Giampaolo Garzarelli & Riccardo Fontanella, 2011. "Open Source Software Production, Spontaneous Input, and Organizational Learning," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 70(4), pages 928-950, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ajecsc:v:70:y:2011:i:4:p:928-950
    DOI: j.1536-7150.2011.00798.x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1536-7150.2011.00798.x
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/j.1536-7150.2011.00798.x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. James G. March, 1991. "Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 2(1), pages 71-87, February.
    2. Paul A. David, 2004. "Understanding the emergence of 'open science' institutions: functionalist economics in historical context," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 13(4), pages 571-589, August.
    3. Bruce Kogut & Anca Metiu, 2001. "Open-Source Software Development and Distributed Innovation," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 17(2), pages 248-264, Summer.
    4. Richard Langlois & Giampaolo Garzarelli, 2008. "Of Hackers and Hairdressers: Modularity and the Organizational Economics of Open-source Collaboration," Industry and Innovation, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 15(2), pages 125-143.
    5. Koen Frenken & Luigi Marengo & Marco Valente, 1999. "Interdependencies, nearly-decomposability and adaption," CEEL Working Papers 9903, Cognitive and Experimental Economics Laboratory, Department of Economics, University of Trento, Italia.
    6. Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas, 1970. "The Economics of Production," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 60(2), pages 1-9, May.
    7. Giuri, Paola & Ploner, Matteo & Rullani, Francesco & Torrisi, Salvatore, 2010. "Skills, division of labor and performance in collective inventions: Evidence from open source software," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 28(1), pages 54-68, January.
    8. Giovanni Dosi & Marco Grazzi, 2006. "Technologies as problem-solving procedures and technologies as input--output relations: some perspectives on the theory of production," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 15(1), pages 173-202, February.
    9. Dopfer,Kurt (ed.), 2005. "The Evolutionary Foundations of Economics," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521621991, September.
    10. Richard Langlois & Pierre Garrouste, 1997. "Cognition, Redundancy, And Learning In Organizations," Economics of Innovation and New Technology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 4(4), pages 287-300.
    11. Giampaolo Garzarelli, 2008. "The Organizational Approach of Capability Theory," Review of Political Economy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(3), pages 443-453.
    12. Garzarelli, Giampaolo & Limam, Yasmina Reem & Thomassen, Bjørn, 2007. "Open Source Software and Economic Growth: A Classical Division of Labor Perspective," MPRA Paper 3849, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    13. Carliss Y. Baldwin & Kim B. Clark, 2000. "Design Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262024667, April.
    14. Leijonhufvud Axel, 2007. "The Individual, the Market and the Division of Labor in Society," Capitalism and Society, De Gruyter, vol. 2(2), pages 1-20, November.
    15. Rosenberg, Nathan, 1969. "The Direction of Technological Change: Inducement Mechanisms and Focusing Devices," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 18(1), pages 1-24, Part I Oc.
    16. Carliss Y. Baldwin, 2008. "Where do transactions come from? Modularity, transactions, and the boundaries of firms," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 17(1), pages 155-195, February.
    17. Frey, Bruno S., 1997. "On the relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic work motivation1," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 15(4), pages 427-439, July.
    18. Atkinson, Anthony B & Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1969. "A New View of Technological Change," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 79(315), pages 573-578, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Giampaolo Garzarelli & Matthew Holian, 2014. "Parchment, guns, and the problem of governance," The Review of Austrian Economics, Springer;Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, vol. 27(1), pages 71-80, March.
    2. Pavitra Dhamija, 2020. "Economic Development and South Africa: 25 Years Analysis (1994 to 2019)," South African Journal of Economics, Economic Society of South Africa, vol. 88(3), pages 298-322, September.
    3. Shuanping Dai & Guanzhong Yang, 2020. "Does Social Inducement Lead to Higher Open Innovation Investment? An Experimental Study," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(5), pages 1-17, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Dosi, Giovanni & Nelson, Richard R., 2010. "Technical Change and Industrial Dynamics as Evolutionary Processes," Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, in: Bronwyn H. Hall & Nathan Rosenberg (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Innovation, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 0, pages 51-127, Elsevier.
    2. Engelhardt, Sebastian v. & Freytag, Andreas, 2013. "Institutions, culture, and open source," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 95(C), pages 90-110.
    3. Becker, Markus C. & Rullani, Francesco & Zirpoli, Francesco, 2021. "The role of digital artefacts in early stages of distributed innovation processes," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 50(10).
    4. Koen Frenken & Stefan Mendritzki, 2012. "Optimal modularity: a demonstration of the evolutionary advantage of modular architectures," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 22(5), pages 935-956, November.
    5. Francesco Rullani & Francesco Zirpoli, 2013. "Coordination of joint search in distributed innovation processes: Lessons from the effects of initial code release in Open Source Software development," Working Papers 20, Venice School of Management - Department of Management, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia.
    6. Giovanni Dosi & Richard Nelson, 2013. "The Evolution of Technologies: An Assessment of the State-of-the-Art," Eurasian Business Review, Springer;Eurasia Business and Economics Society, vol. 3(1), pages 3-46, June.
    7. Mary Tripsas, 2008. "Customer preference discontinuities: a trigger for radical technological change," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(2-3), pages 79-97.
    8. Cristiano Antonelli, 2011. "The Economic Complexity of Technological Change: Knowledge Interaction and Path Dependence," Chapters, in: Cristiano Antonelli (ed.), Handbook on the Economic Complexity of Technological Change, chapter 1, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    9. Giampaolo Garzarelli & Matthew Holian, 2014. "Parchment, guns, and the problem of governance," The Review of Austrian Economics, Springer;Society for the Development of Austrian Economics, vol. 27(1), pages 71-80, March.
    10. Jiang Wei & Yang Yang & Sali Li, 2021. "Mirror or no mirror? Architectural design of cross-border integration of Chinese multinational enterprises," Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Springer, vol. 38(4), pages 1399-1430, December.
    11. Orsatti, Gianluca & Quatraro, Francesco & Pezzoni, Michele, 2020. "The antecedents of green technologies: The role of team-level recombinant capabilities," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 49(3).
    12. Rullani, Francesco & Haefliger, Stefan, 2013. "The periphery on stage: The intra-organizational dynamics in online communities of creation," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 42(4), pages 941-953.
    13. Karén Hovhannisian & Marco Valente, 2005. "Modeling Directed Local Search Strategies on Technology," Computational Economics 0507001, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Kurt Dopfer & Jason Potts & Andreas Pyka, 2017. "Upward and Downward Complementarity: The Meso Core of Evolutionary Growth Theory," Economic Complexity and Evolution, in: Andreas Pyka & Uwe Cantner (ed.), Foundations of Economic Change, pages 69-80, Springer.
    15. Giovanni Dosi & Marco Grazzi, 2006. "Technologies as problem-solving procedures and technologies as input--output relations: some perspectives on the theory of production," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 15(1), pages 173-202, February.
    16. Scazzieri, Roberto, 2014. "A structural theory of increasing returns," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 29(C), pages 75-88.
    17. Andreoni, Antonio, 2014. "Structural learning: Embedding discoveries and the dynamics of production," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 29(C), pages 58-74.
    18. Michael G. Jacobides & Carmelo Cennamo & Annabelle Gawer, 2018. "Towards a theory of ecosystems," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 39(8), pages 2255-2276, August.
    19. Giovanni Dosi & Marco Faillo & Luigi Marengo & Daniele Moschella, 2011. "Toward Formal Representations of Search Processes and Routines in Organizational Problem Solving. An Assessment of the State of the Art," LEM Papers Series 2011/04, Laboratory of Economics and Management (LEM), Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy.
    20. Baldwin, Carliss Y. & Bogers, Marcel L.A.M. & Kapoor, Rahul & West, Joel, 2024. "Focusing the ecosystem lens on innovation studies," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 53(3).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • L23 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Organization of Production
    • D20 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - General
    • L17 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Open Source Products and Markets

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ajecsc:v:70:y:2011:i:4:p:928-950. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0002-9246 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.