The Emergence of a new commercial actor: community managed software projects (Please contact the author for the dissertation)

Institutional theory has matured to the point where we know a great deal about how institutions, once formed, are reproduced. We know less about how they are constructed. This study examines how social movements might inspire the creation of new organizing mechanisms. If new organizational forms result from recombination of existing elements, how might challenging and defending groups affect their construction? An inductive, ethnographic approach was used to examine interactions between community managed software projects from the free software and open source social movements (challengers) and established firms in the software industry (defenders). With interviews of seventy contributors and close examination of the practices used by four projects to manage their interactions with firms., I find that both community projects and firms made changes in their practices and form to better collaborate.