Social Forces and Constraint in the Attainment of Community Status

A study of social forces at work within an online community of free software developers, this paper investigates the manner in which social forces exert pressure that initially shapes and defines an actor's status within the community, but eventually constrain that actor's movement within a status order. The results of empirical analyses at the dyad level show that, in the process of status attainment, community members tend to evaluate a focal actor's reputation according to publicly available social cues. Ironically, these same social cues eventually work to produce stability and constraint in an actor's status position by reducing heterogeneity in community status beliefs.