Structural Differentiation in Social Media: Adhocracy, Entropy, and the “1 % Effect”

This book explores community dynamics within social media. Using Wikipedia as an example, the volume explores communities that rely upon commons-based peer production. Fundamental theoretical principles spanning such domains as organizational configurations, leadership roles, and social evolutionary theory are developed. In the context of Wikipedia, these theories explain how a functional elite of highly productive editors has emerged and why they are responsible for a majority of the content. It explains how the elite shapes the project and how this group tends to become stable and increasingly influential over time. Wikipedia has developed a new and resilient social hierarchy, an adhocracy, which combines features of traditional and new, online, social organizations. The book presents a set of practical approaches for using these theories in real-world practice.

This work fundamentally changes the way we think about social media leadership and evolution, emphasizing the crucial contributions of leadership, of elite social roles, and of group global structure to the overall success and stability of large social media projects. Written in an accessible and direct style, the book will be of interest to academics as well as professionals with an interest in social media and commons-based peer production processes.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Part I: Structural Differentiation and Social Media: Theoretical Framework
Chapter 2: Macro-Structural Perspectives on Social Differentiation and Organizational Evolution in Online Groups
Chapter 3: Specifying a Wikipedia-Centric Explanatory Model for Online Group Evolution and Structural Differentiation
Chapter 4: Social Structuration Online: Entropy and Social Systems
Chapter 5: Analytic Investigation of a Structural Differentiation Model for Social Media Production Groups

Part II: Configurational Change Phases and Motors in Online Collaboration
Chapter 6: The Foundations of a Theoretical Model for Organizational Configurations and Change in Online Collaborative Processes
Chapter 7: Organizational Configurations and Configurational Change
Chapter 8: A Synthesized Theoretical Framework for Motors Driving Organizational Configurational Change
Chapter 9: Wikipedia Evolution: Trends and Phases
Chapter 10: Breakpoints and Concurrent Factors

Part III: Future Theoretical and Practical Directions
Chapter 11: Conclusions

Appendix A: Data Collection, Management, Preprocessing, and Analysis
Appendix B: Historical and Media Analysis of Wikipedia’s Evolutionary Context
Appendix C: Advantages and Disadvantages of Stepwise Segmented Regression Analysis