Reaching for the Top: A Practice Approach to Understanding Power Dynamics in Online Communities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Online communities rely on the collaborative efforts of their members to function and create value. Yet, the existence of collaboration does not deny that members navigate their way through their interactions also to gain status and power. Through our detailed study of an online collaborative community, we build a theory that explains how online community members compete for power and status through power contestation practices that also enable collaboration. By employing Bourdieu’s practice theory, we conceptualize the community as a field of practice, bounded by its sociomaterial structure, and having contextually meaningful capital that members compete for. We identify six practices that members use to create structure-sustaining and structure-challenging dynamics. We argue that members in positions of power, whom we call veterans, enact practices to sustain the structure and maintain their positions of power. On the other hand, members with low power, whom we call novices, enact practices to challenge the structure by attempting to reorganize the capital distribution in a way that brings them more power. Our paper contributes to both social structure and collaboration literature streams of online contexts by providing a more thorough understanding of how power contestation and social stratification occur, not despite collaboration, but through collaboration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".