The Organization of Reconciliation in Distributed Work

Highly distributed, loosely organized, independent, informal work organizations sometimes manage both joint efforts and collective welfare at least as well as centralized bureaucracies do. This aligns closely with the view that markets are superior to bureaucracies as ways of organizing both joint efforts and collective welfare. There are other forms of work organization between perfect markets and pure bureaucracies that aggregate and restrict individual commitments into a collective structure, regulate resource flows among participants, and enforce some form of distributive justice, all without centralized authority. This paper discusses four such intermediates and suggests some of the research needed to bring out their implications for computer support. The four are: common pool resources, cross-cutting ties among networks of affiliation, patronage systems, and participant review.