Collective Action in Peer Production: On How Processes of Elastic Integration Incorporates Messiness in a Collective Crisis Response

Past research assumes that collective action requires collective action frames and strong coordination carried out by formal organizations. Such assumptions are challenged in this paper, which explores how strongly coordinated collective action is achieved in an open network with a diverse constituency driven by personal action frames. With a processual-relational ontology, I study this through a 5 week netnography of an open network of peer production, which builds on principles of high individual autonomy. I find that the coordination and autonomy are simultaneously enacted in processes of ‘elastic integration’, which incorporates divergent claims of the constituency, i.a. by the use of non-decisions. While elastic integration allows for variation and dissent in the group, it does so in different ways, which produce certain types of autonomy as more legitimate than other, and thus create a segmentation of membership