People Power

I’m about to do something foolish — I’m going to allow a soundbite (regarding a discipline in which I have virtually no training) to inspire a blog post.  Nonetheless, I’m persisting in my foolishness because today’s announcement of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom included references to concepts that rang social media and knowledge management bells for me.

Ostrom has studied how people use, and govern the use of, shared resources. Here’s how The New York Times describes her work:

Ms. Ostrom’s work focuses on the commons, such as how pools of users manage natural resources as common property. The traditional view is that common ownership results in excessive exploitation of resources — the so-called tragedy of the commons that occurs when fishermen overfish a common pond, for example. The proposed solution is usually to make users bear the external costs of their utilization by privatizing the resource or imposing government regulations such as taxes or quotas.

Ms. Ostrom’s empirical research has shown that this explanation is “overly simplistic,” the prize committee says: There are many cases around the world in which common property is “surprisingly well-managed.” In these cases commons users “create and enforce rules that mitigate overexploitation” without having to resort to privatization and government regulation (which can both pose their own practical difficulties).

In an interview I heard today, Elinor Ostrom talked about various failed attempts by central authorities to dictate the sensible use and sustainability of shared resources.  She then contrasted this with the success of people on the front lines in cooperating to manage these resources by adapting rules to local conditions, something the central authorities often have trouble doing.  These themes are echoed by the Nobel prize committee:

The lesson is not that user-management is always preferable to all other solutions. … Rather, the main lesson is that common property is often managed on the basis of rules and procedures that have evolved over long periods of time. As a result they are more adequate and subtle than outsiders – both politicians and social scientists – have tended to realize. Beyond showing that self-governance can be feasible and successful, Ostrom also elucidates the key features of successful governance. One instance is that active participation of users in creating and enforcing rules appears to be essential. Rules that are imposed from the outside or unilaterally dictated by powerful insiders have less legitimacy and are more likely to be violated. Likewise, monitoring and enforcement work better when conducted by insiders than by outsiders. These principles are in stark contrast to the common view that monitoring and sanctioning are the responsibility of the state and should be conducted by public employees. [emphasis added]

Freely admitting that I have never studied Elinor Ostrom’s work, I find myself wondering whether her research regarding the importance of the active participation of users in creating and enforcing rules could be transferred to the modern enterprise and its quest to control the uses of social media. If people can be trusted to manage precious natural and man-made resources, is it a huge leap to allow them to manage a shared resource like a social media platform?  If centralized authorities have trouble adapting to local conditions with respect to certain resources, why should it be different with resources within an enterprise.  Are some things better left in the hands of the people on the front lines?

I do hope someone with training in economics takes another look at Elinor Ostrom’s work, with a view to determining its applicability to knowledge management and shared online resources.  In the meantime, however, I’m going to think some more about why our drive for safety leads us to command-and-control structures that often are futile and ultimately undermine the safety we seek.

[Photo Credit:  Indiana University via Getty Images]