Boundary Organizations: Enabling Collaboration among Unexpected Allies

Abstract

Our research examines how parties challenging established social systems collaborate with defenders of those systems to achieve mutual goals. With field interviews and observations from four community projects in the open-source movement, we examine how these projects collaborated with firms defending proprietary approaches to software development. Drawing on social movement and organizational theory, we explain how challenging parties not only mobilize to achieve their goals but how they are able to transform contestation into collaboration. Open-source projects and firms held divergent interests but discovered areas of convergent interest and were able to adapt their organizing practices to collaborate through the creation of a boundary organization. By showing how boundary organizations help challengers and defenders manage four critical domains of organizing practices—governance, membership, ownership, and control over production—we provide analytic levers for determining when boundary organizations work. At the same time, we reveal the subsequent triadic role structure that unfolded among communities, the boundary organizations they designed, and firms.