The Big Project That Never Ends': Role and Task Negotiation Within an Emerging Occupational Community

This dissertation involved in-depth interviews of over fifty open source developers in two major open source projects. The primary areas of interest were 1) conducting an ethnographic study of the work practices and culture of 'post-burecratic' organizations to see what lessons these groups may hold for managing intellectual labor and 2) examining whether the open source movement represents a new professional model for software engineering.