Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy: Distributed Collaboration in Open Source Software Teams

• In Event: 4255 - Section on Economic Sociology Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 4. Firm / Organizational Level Dynamics

Abstract

According to the iron law of oligarchy (Michels 1911), democratic organizations tend toward oligarchical control. We assess the extent to which democratically organized work teams are characterized by broad membership contributions (“distributed collaboration”) versus contributions that are dominated by a small subset of members. This study focuses on the case of GitHub, an online open source platform where software developers collaborate on coding projects. Using data on over 20,000 GitHub projects, we test a set of theoretical propositions about the conditions that facilitate distributed collaboration as opposed to oligarchical dominance. Results from linear modeling show that distributed collaboration is associated with size of each team, variance in the skills and status of team members, and positioning of the teams in a broader network of projects. The findings suggest that, given the right social conditions, it is possible to break the tendencies toward oligarchical control in democratic work organizations.

Authors

• Chao Liu, North Carolina State University

• Steve McDonald, North Carolina State University