[p2p-research] Your Swarm Registration / enterprise p2p governance

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Kevin,

very useful .. do you have a link to the original article?

how is your own book on decentralized production progressing.

you probably know I have collated lots of material in this new section:
http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design

do you have any thoughts on christian siefkes' propositions for a physical
peer economy?

Michel

On Jan 1, 2008 2:53 AM, Kevin Carson <free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 12/27/07, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I think you hit the nail on the head with your explanation of why there
> is a
> > fundamental contradiction for the peer to peer governance of
> corporations.
> >
>  > On Dec 26, 2007 10:20 PM, Henrik Ingo <henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi>
> wrote:
>
> > > From
> > > this it follows that a modern enterprise is not well suited for  a p2p
> > > governance model, because in commercial enterprises aka as companies
> > > the power by definition lies solely within its owners ("hegemony of
> > > the owner"). Therefore the balance from "community voting with its
> > > feet" is lacking. By this logic even if a company was seemingly
> > > governed by a p2p process, in reality it would only be at the grace of
> > > the owners, who at any time could take back the power they had decided
> > > to give to the p2p process. (To be continued below...)
>
> Luigi Zingales argued in a 2000 article ("In Search of New
> Foundations") that the old model of absentee capitalist ownership and
> internal hierarchy was obsolete in firms whose most important asset
> was human capital.  Because human capital was the critical factor and
> the entry barriers presented by capitalization requirements were low,
> in human capital industries the natural model would be some form of
> worker ownership (based on the new institutionalist principle that
> agency costs are minimized by vesting firm ownership in the hardest to
> monitor factor).  He presented several examples of human capital firms
> where the skilled workers who constituted the core of the firm simply
> walked out and started another firm, leaving the old firm as a hollow
> shell.  At the time he wrote the article, p2p theory was still quite
> marginal compared to its status today.  But it seems to me that when
> physical capital outlays are relatively modest and within average
> individual means, the whole rationale for the "firm" disappears
> altogether.  As I emailed Zingales:
>
> Your article was written in 2000, before work like that of Yochai
> Benkler and others made peer-production a widely-discussed idea.  You
> seemed to see the main problem then as securing the stability of the
> firm by creating enforceable property rights in the value created by
> human capital, so as to overcome agency problems.  But I wonder how
> necessary the firm really is in industries centered mainly on human
> capital with low physical capital outlays.  In some areas, like
> software and music, the main thing still keeping the corporate
> boundaries up at all is artificial property rights like IP.  Aside
> from the gatekeeping function of such artificial property rights in
> creating barriers between human capital and its independent access to
> the market, there's little difference between the kinds of peer
> networks that work within (say) Microsoft, and those on the outside
> engaged in free software development.  If the artificial property
> rights were eliminated, along with the gatekeeping power that went
> with it, firm boundaries might simply dissolve, leaving the natural
> form of organization in human capital industries as loose peer
> networks constantly federating, gaining and losing members.
>
> Cooperative ownership might well be the ideal model of firm for
> physical production (although even in this case small-scale desktop
> manufacturing technology may eventually make possible distributed
> manufacturing on the same model as distributed knowledge work).  But
> isn't it arguably just putting new wine in old bottles, trying to
> preserve the firm when it's not necessary for governing physical
> assets?
>
> Best,
> Kevin
>
> --
> Kevin Carson
> Mutualist.Org:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
> http://www.mutualist.org
> Mutualist Blog http://mutualist.blogspot.com
>



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