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Socializing the Crowd: Learning to Talk in Citizen Science
Abstract   Open access

Socializing the Crowd: Learning to Talk in Citizen Science

C. S Oesterlund, G Mugar, Corey Jackson, Katie Devries Hassman and K Crowston
Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings, Vol.2014(1), p.16799
01/01/2014
DOI: 10.5465/AMBPP.2014.16799abstract
url
https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2014.16799abstractView
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Crowdsourced initiatives rely on contributions from experienced and non-experienced contributors rather than on permanent workers. Such new organizational forms challenge existing theories of organizational socialization. Theoretically, the present paper merges insights from the socialization literature with notions of multiple spaces and forms of presence drawn from the sociomateriality debate, leading us to conceptualize socialization as emerging out of the mutual co-construction of the technical infrastructure and the volunteers. Combining virtual ethnography, trace ethnography, and survey responses, we study socialization of participants in a large citizen science project involving more than 800,000 participants. Our results depict newcomer socialization as a gradual change in the types of spaces participants perform. They start out performing scientific and communal system features as highly structured regional spaces characterized by authoritative-subject forms of relations. As they become more comfortable with the scientific practices some participants shift to perform system features as a resonance space characterized by a communal form of authority. The research contributes to our understanding of socialization in crowdsourced environments and implications their design and management.

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