Hackerspaces as Entrepreneurial Anarchy
28 Pages Posted: 17 Mar 2016 Last revised: 11 Jun 2017
Date Written: January 13, 2017
Abstract
Analyses hackerspaces as an empirical example of an innovation commons (Allen & Potts, 2016). Hackerspaces are where hackers engage in non-price coordination of entrepreneurial information about market opportunities under privately developed rules. An analytic narrative over secondary data of hackerspaces reveals private governance mechanisms including graduated social ostracism, costly signalling to facilitate ordering, collective action processes and nested hierarchies of rules. Hackerspace anarchy may be a comparatively efficient institutional solution to the earliest stages of the entrepreneurial innovation problem compared to firms, markets and states.
Keywords: Positive political anarchy, hackerspaces, innovation problem, entangled political economy.
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