Iannacci, Federico

f.iannacci@lse.ac.uk

The Social Psychology of Open Sourcing: the Linux case study

The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines cognition in philosophical terms as 'the action or faculty of knowing taken in its widest sense, including sensation, perception, conception, etc. as distinguished from feeling and volition'. The third edition of the Collins English Dictionary provides a similar definition: cognition is 'the mental act or process by which knowledge is acquired including perception, intuition and reasoning'.

Considering that the Oxford English Dictionary expressively states that cognition refers to the action/ faculty of knowing in its widest sense we may well label cognition as a mental process of knowing including sensation, perception, conception, intuition and reasoning. Cognitive issues, thus, belong to the realm of sensation, perception, conception, intuition and reasoning.

Indeed a portion of this PhD dissertation may be seen as falling in this domain. Chapter three on loose coupling, for instance, may be seen as a chapter on reasoning to the extent that we associate reasoning with decision-making. Chapter four on managing processes, instead, may be conceived of as a chapter on sensation, perception and conception to the extent that we acknowledge that sensations, perceptions and conceptions are somehow anchored into our own beliefs and vice versa. Chapter five on bricolage, additionally, may be seen as a chapter on intuition to the extent that resourcefulness is associated with intuition.

Writing a PhD dissertation focussed on cognition is not an easy task because we are dealing with complex and abstract issues. Yet cognition is so far-reaching that it arguably involves the way we represent ourselves to ourselves, our interactions other than our own minds. The question though remains: how do we study cognition? The tentative answer is to study our interactions because they unfold through symbolic representations that are the product of our own minds. To be sure, this method is not boundary-less considering that we are to study cognition only from the outside (Luhmann 1995).

The purpose of the opening chapter of the thesis, thus, is to describe the extant literature on open source and Linux to show its bias against cognition. Once this conceptual gap has been acknowledged, we describe the methodology we intend to pursue to address the associated cognitive issues. The following chapters, instead, track the interactive patterns characterising the Linux social practices and, subsequently, study their cognitive underpinnings at the 'reasoning, perception and intuition' level.

Supervisor: Jannis Kallinikos, PhD

Federico Iannacci's personal web page.

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