[P2P-F] CfP JoPP - Work issue

[Vasilis Kostakis]

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 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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