Purpose This paper aims to examine how publication temporality and citation impact jointly inform the contemporary evolution of organisational capability within the resource-based view (RBV) literature between 2021 and 2025. This study clarifies how theoretical thinking about firm resources has shifted towards novel forms of value-creating organisational capabilities and identifies the consolidation of theoretical themes and future research directions within the field. Design/methodology/approach This study analyses 4,232 peer-reviewed articles published between 2021 and 2025, a period that accounts for nearly 50% of all RBV literature published since 1984. This study uses a quantitative bibliometric and science-mapping methodology, including semantic co-occurrence analysis of author keywords, with overlay and density visualisations in VOSviewer. Overlay maps highlight the temporal relevance of organisational capability constructs, and density maps reveal their structural and conceptual influence. The dual-lens approach provides a diagnostic framework for interpreting the contemporary trajectory of RBV-based organisational research. Findings The findings reveal a structural shift in how RBV scholarship conceptualises organisational capability, through three distinct evolutionary trajectories. Firstly, core renewal, where digital transformation and artificial intelligence fuse with dynamic capabilities to create high-impact internal capability routines. Secondly, emergent experimentation, in which constructs such as entrepreneurship, early-stage resource bootstrapping and blockchain form exploration frontiers. Thirdly, stable influence, in which environmental performance, the natural resource-based view and corporate social responsibility are broadly accepted as baseline pillars. This paper demonstrates that there is an active reconfiguration of traditional resource logic within the RBV field, with organisational capabilities moving along divergent theoretical trajectories. Research implications This study offers a diagnostic framework for positioning future RBV research within organisational theory. It delineates which capability constructs are undergoing renewal, which peripheral themes merit further development and which established organisational vocabularies continue to anchor the field. The dual-lens approach reveals where visibility is rising, but citation influence lags, guiding scholars in prioritising constructs for theoretical extension, consolidation and empirical testing. Practical implications For strategists and corporate leaders, the findings reframe how competitive advantage is created and sustained in volatile, unpredictable environments. Instead of relying on static, capital-heavy physical asset stocks, strategic advantage requires dynamic resource orchestration â coalescing flexible digital capabilities, cross-border relational networks and alliances and ecological stewardship into hard-to-imitate organisational routines that drive resilient value creation. Social implications The findings indicate that contemporary RBV scholarship increasingly aligns firm capability building with societal demands for environmental sustainability, ethical governance and digital inclusion. The results categorise transient, emergent and enduring capability practices â including those within resource-constrained contexts â and provide policymakers with actionable insights to inform initiatives aimed at organisational resilience and sustainable economic development. Originality/value To the best of the authorsâ knowledge, this paper provides the first quantitative dual-lens structural and thematic synthesis of contemporary RBV literature published between 2021 and 2025 â a pivotal period accounting for nearly 50% of all RBV publications and 16% of all RBV citations since 1984. It introduces an integrative diagnostic framework that analyses the evolving theoretical identity of a leading strategic management theory. This study operationalises the divergence between publication recency and citation authority and advances a novel theoretical typology â core renewal, emergent experimentation and stable influence â that reveals how traditional firm resource logic has been actively reconfigured across the contemporary literature in response to technological disruptions, regulatory mandates and global shocks.
How do multiple possible action trajectories progressively narrow into one failing line of activity? While escalation of commitment scholars have long puzzled over this question, their tendency to conflate escalation with persistence and treat commitment as primarily cognitive compromises the conceptâs theoretical precision and practical relevance. Adopting a communicative-relational ontology, we reconceptualize escalation as a process of communicatively constituted, ventriloquial attachment. We draw on an in-depth study of an interorganizational team to trace how such an attachment to the idea of working with blockchain technology emerged and progressively intensified in membersâ interaction, pulling the team toward a single line of activity while alternatives were increasingly sidelined to a point where detaching became seemingly impossible. Our findings introduce the concept of escalating attachment , emphasizing how escalating processes are dynamic, relational accomplishments that both pull action forward along select lines of activity and hold it in place. This, we claim, resonates with practitionersâ lived experiences of how they not only hold onto an idea but also become progressively held by that very same idea. Further, our insights contribute to the communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) literature by lifting scholarsâ focus away from situated (inter)action and toward how (inter)actions connect.
Vitor Lima, Marco Tulio Zanini, Bernardo Silva-RĂȘgo
This paper examines how future-oriented collective visions shape the potential legitimacy of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as brand assets. Drawing on sociotechnical imaginaries and institutional theory, we study Brazilian football, where supporter culture, media discourse, and regulatory uncertainty intensify legitimation. We triangulate ten senior executivesâ interviews with 1,117 Brazilian news articles (2020â2025) using Corbin and Straussâ coding with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). We identify four visions: Tokenised Collectables, Unregulated Speculation, Emotional Wildcards, and Trust-by-Code Tech Merch, and trace their performative manifestations. These manifestations stabilise or destabilise regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive pillars, explaining why initiatives are embraced, contested, and reinterpreted as hype cycles shift. We offer staged managerial guidance for fan-facing innovation. We add a future-oriented mechanism to legitimacy research overall.
Management and Organizational Studies
Sports, Gender, and Society
Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) represent one of the most consequential experiments in organizational design to emerge from blockchain technology. By encoding governance rules into smart contracts and recording every vote, proposal, and treasury decision immutably on-chain, DAOs offer globally distributed communities a high degree of transparency and accountability in collective decision-making. This study examines governance design and participatory innovation across three DAOs: RARI DAO, Arbitrum DAO, and Optimism DAO. Each has taken a distinct structural approach to the problem of collective decision-making at scale. Using a qualitative comparative case study method, the research draws on governance forum discussions, proposal records, and official documentation, analyzed through thematic coding and cross-case comparison. The theoretical frame draws primarily from Ostromâs (1990) commons governance principles, with Scottâs (1995, 2014) institutional theory and Donaldsonâs (2001) contingency theory applied as supplementary analytical lenses. Across all three cases, the findings indicate the emergence of increasingly formalized governance architectures designed to balance decentralization, coordination efficiency, and operational security. Communities building governance infrastructure from scratch, iterating rapidly in response to community feedback, and developing structural solutions: delegate incentive programs, participation incentive mechanisms, bicameral legitimacy systems, constitutional frameworks, and dedicated legal entities that represent an emerging configuration of governance mechanisms. Two cross-case findings are particularly notable. First, all three DAOs independently converged on a three-body governance architecture comprising a legal foundation, a security council, and token-holder governance â suggesting that similar governance problems, encountered in similar technical and legal environments, tend to produce similar structural solutions. Second, while these architectures are structurally similar, they differ significantly in how governance processes are implemented in practice, reflecting differences in scale, formalization, and community context. These findings contribute to the literature by providing a structured cross-case analysis of DAO governance design and offering practical insights into programmable institutional design and blockchain-enabled coordination systems.
Purpose â Both Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and Holacracies are positioned as alternatives to managerial hierarchy, yet they remain largely uncompared in the organizational theory literature. This paper asks: in what ways do DAOs and Holacracies converge and diverge as decentralized governance structures, and under what organizational conditions is each model more effective?Design/methodology/approach â This paper employs a conceptual comparative methodology, synthesizing organizational theory, open strategy scholarship and blockchain governance literature to map both structures across six governance dimensions: authority distribution, decision mechanism, membership and inclusion, accountability system, transparency and adaptability. Three theoretical propositions are developed.Findings â Although DAOs and Holacracies share a commitment to decentralized authority, they differ fundamentally in governance architecture. Holacracy achieves decentralization through formalized role-based consent governance; DAOs rely on algorithmic enforcement via smart contracts and token-weighted voting. These differences produce distinct failure modes â role ambiguity and cultural resistance in Holacracy; plutocratic concentration and voter apathy in DAOs.Practical implications â Organizations considering decentralized governance can use the typology developed here to match governance model to organizational context. High-formalization environments benefit from Holacracy's constitution-based approach; open, distributed communities may favor DAO architectures, provided token-concentration mechanisms are counteracted.Originality/value â This is the first paper to systematically compare Holacracy and DAO governance through an integrated organizational theory lens, connecting open strategy scholarship with blockchain governance research. Three falsifiable propositions and a governance typology are contributed.
This paper introduces Mirror Protocol as an implementation layer for the Conditions of Understanding. Rather than proposing another theory of understanding, the paper describes a practical method for protecting the conditions under which understanding can emerge. It argues that genuine understanding is often disrupted not by lack of information but by premature evaluation, guidance, intervention, or meaning fixation. Building upon The Conditions of Understanding, the paper presents a five-stage protocol consisting of Reality / Sensation / State, Project Mirror, Friction Detection Point, Meaning Non-Capture Protocol, and Leave to the World. Together these stages describe how one can remain engaged with another personâs process without prematurely directing or completing it. The paper further distinguishes reflecting from indifference, and non-capture from non-response, arguing that restraint is an active practice rather than passive inaction. Friction is interpreted not as failure but as evidence that the protocol is functioning, provided the impulse to intervene is recognized without being acted upon. Mirror Protocol is proposed not as a communication technique but as a general implementation framework for preserving the conditions in which observation, discovery, and understanding are allowed to arise naturally. It concludes by positioning the protocol as a bridge between theoretical principles and future organizational or institutional applications. This paper is part of a four-part series on the conditions and infrastructure of human understanding: This paper uses "Mirror Protocol" as a concept within Maura Theory, an independent theoretical framework concerning the conditions of human understanding. It is unrelated to the decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol of the same name operating on the Terra blockchain. (1) From Information Access to Meaning Recognition: Professional Expertise After the Cost of Information Collapses https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21230076 (2) The Conditions of Understanding: Protecting the Conditions Under Which Understanding Emerges https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21251927 (3) Mirror Protocol: An Implementation Layer for the Conditions of Understanding https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21252084 (4) Understanding Infrastructure: Scaling the Conditions of Understanding to Organizations and Institutions https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21252316
Gossipsub is the primary peer-to-peer dissemination protocol used by large-scale Web3 systems such as Ethereum, Filecoin, and IPFS. Despite its widespread deployment, the choice of its key parametersâthe eager mesh degree D (number of peers that receive messages eagerly) and the gossip degree Dlazy (number of peers periodically notified via gossip)âhas largely relied on heuristics, with little quantitative guidance. Consequently, production networks lack a principled understanding of the delivery rate, bandwidth cost, and latency tradeoffs induced by these parameters.
Nagwan AlQershi, T. Ramayah, Mohammed Alzoraiki, Gamal Abdualmajed Ali · 5 authors
Purpose This study examines how agentic leadership, conscious unbossing and AI-augmented ethical decision-making (AI-EDM) jointly shape crisis-resilient leadership among emerging global leaders. Addressing a key gap in leadership scholarship, the study conceptualizes artificial intelligence (AI) not merely as a technical tool but as a governance architecture that structures decision authority, accountability and ethical action under conditions of uncertainty. Design/methodology/approach A mixed-method design was employed. Survey data were collected from 423 early-career professionals across 12 countries. Partial least squares structural equation modeling using SmartPLS (version 4.1.1.6) tested a moderated mediation model in which agentic leadership predicts crisis-resilient leadership effectiveness (CR-LE) through AI-EDM, with conscious unbossing and crisis exposure as moderating conditions. Qualitative interviews with 24 Gen Z leaders operating in crisis-prone contexts were used to contextualize and interpret the quantitative findings. Findings Agentic leadership significantly predicted CR-LE, with this relationship mediated by AI-EDM. The indirect pathway was stronger among leaders exhibiting higher levels of conscious unbossing, indicating that leadership agency is conditioned by decentralized and algorithmically governed authority structures. Crisis exposure intensified the salience of ethical AI engagement, highlighting the heightened accountability pressures leaders face under volatility. Qualitative findings reinforced these results, illustrating how leaders navigate responsibility for outcomes shaped by AI-mediated decision systems they do not fully control. Research limitations/implications The cross-sectional design limits causal inference, and scalar measurement invariance was not tested. Future longitudinal and cross-contextual research is needed to examine how leadership agency and accountability operate across different institutional and regulatory environments. Practical implications The findings underscore the need to reconceptualize leadership development and organizational governance for AI-mediated contexts. Rather than focusing solely on ethical capability enhancement, organizations and policymakers must equip leaders to operate under algorithmic constraints by clarifying decision rights, escalation pathways and contestability mechanisms. Originality/value This study advances leadership theory by identifying accountability displacement under AI-mediated governance as a central mechanism reshaping leadership agency in crisis contexts. It reframes leadership not as autonomous discretion or technological mastery but as accountable action under constraint within socio-technical governance systems.
Chapter 9 of the Vital Intelligence Doctrine (VID) introduces Tensegrity Architecture as a paradigm shift for organizational design. Moving away from rigid hierarchical 'pyramids,' this chapter proposes a model based on 'Discontinuous Compression and Continuous Tension.' It explores how to build self-regulating organizations using Synergetics, autonomous VID-units, and dynamic messaging matrices. By implementing these principles, leaders can create resilient, antifragile entities that operate through internal balance rather than central control. Keywords: â Vital Intelligence Doctrineâ , â VIDâ , â Tensegrityâ , â Synergeticsâ , â Decentralized Governanceâ , â Organizational Architectureâ , â Systemic Resilienceâ , â Self-organizing Organizationsâ .
This paper empirically demonstrates Zharnikov's (2026ao) Proposition P4 â rendering-equivalence under spine-preservation â in management theory. The paper extends the companion theory's HeisenbergâSchrödinger historical existence proof into contemporary strategy research via structural extractions of two independently-authored pairs: a dynamic-capabilities pair (Eisenhardt and Martin 2000 + Zollo and Winter 2002) and a knowledge-based-view pair from the SMJ Winter 1996 Special Issue (Grant 1996 + Liebeskind 1996). The recombination metric Rec returns 4 linked propositions with preserved antecedents on each pair. A random-graph null baseline shows Pr(Rec â„ 3 by chance) â .000 across 1,000 size-matched shadows. Three additional renderings of substrates already in the corpus â a practitioner-register rendering of the paper's own structure, a third rendering of the focal-pair shared substrate, and a cross-paper rendering of the companion theory's full theoretical apparatus â preserve 11/14, 4/4, and 12/15 items strictly; 14/14, 4/4, and 15/15 semantically; zero contradictions. A bibliographic-hallucination audit of twelve AI-suggested anchors finds two verified and ten negative findings. Secondary ÎČ/ÎŽ estimates satisfy the cost-asymmetry ordering. Cross-language demonstrations span Russian renderings across multiple LLMs (including Russian-native GigaChat Rec = 12 and YandexGPT Rec = 11) and Chinese renderings across five LLMs from three training-corpus families including an open-weights model running locally on a single Mac mini (DeepSeek Rec = 12, Claude Opus Rec = 11, Qwen3.6:27b Rec = 12), with cross-extractor robustness (DeepSeek's Chinese rendering re-extracted by Qwen3.6 instead of GPT-4o: Rec = 12). Inter-coder reliability tests are pre-registered for a future release. The paper engages recombinant-search and knowledge-representation scholarship as theoretical antecedents. Includes paper.yaml (Paper Spec v0.1.0) â a machine-readable specification of the paper's claims, assumptions, and dependencies. See https://github.com/spectralbranding/paper-spec for the standard.
This paper examines Web3 ecosystems not merely as markets for digital assets, but as networked social spaces where economic transactions give rise to enduring social ties, shared narratives, and collective identities. Leveraging large-scale data mining of fused on-chain blockchain transactions and off-chain social media activity, we analyze over one hundred NFT collections to uncover how different forms of participation structure community formation in decentralized environments. Using network analysis, we identify distinct ecosystem roles, such as long-term holders, active traders, and short-term speculators, and demonstrate how each produces markedly different network topologies, levels of cohesion, and pathways for influence. We complement this structural analysis with discourse analysis of social media engagement, revealing how narrative production, visibility, and sustained interaction persist even as transactional activity declines. Our findings show that communities centered on holding behavior evolve from transactional networks into socially embedded ecosystems characterized by dense ties, decentralized influence, and ongoing cultural participation, while trader- and speculator-dominated networks remain fragmented and transactional. By linking network structure with discursive dynamics, this study provides a sociotechnical framework for understanding how value, identity, and inequality are negotiated in Web3 spaces. The approach offers a scalable method for detecting patterns of inclusion, exclusion, and representational imbalance, advancing network-based research on digital communities beyond purely economic or technical accounts.
This paper introduces a systems-theoretic framework for understanding how high-coherence social structures emerge following the collapse of centralized ideological movements. Using the fragmentation of the Black Panther Party and the subsequent rise of Chicago-based organizations such as the Gangster Disciples and Black P. Stone Nation as a primary case study, the research analyzes how identity systems function as distributed governance mechanisms in high-threat environments. The paper argues that after a loss of centralized coordination capacityâaccelerated in this case by external intervention such as COINTELPRO and internal organizational fragmentationâlocalized groups reconstruct coherence through symbolic and procedural frameworks. These identity systems, composed of geometric symbols, ritualized protocols, and codified behavioral rules (âThe Literatureâ), act as low-cost identity verification mechanisms and enable rule-based behavioral alignment across decentralized networks. By applying a comparative systems lens, the study draws a functional analogy between these 20th-century urban dynamics and the historical nationalization of Israelite tribal identity in the ancient Near East (cf. William G. Dever). In both contexts, fragmented groups achieve large-scale coordination through the implementation of standardized identity codes, compliance signaling mechanisms (e.g., taxation/tithing), and boundary-maintaining symbolic systems. These mechanisms allow for structural persistence even in the absence of continuous centralized enforcement. The paper further develops the concept of distributed command, in which authority is embedded within the identity system itself rather than dependent on the physical presence of leadership figures such as Larry Hoover and Jeff Fort. This shift enables what is defined as Projected Threat Recursion, where adherence to system rules is maintained through internalized identity and anticipated enforcement rather than immediate coercion. To support operationalization, the study proposes a preliminary Coherence Coefficient (Câ) model, conceptualizing system stability as a function of alignment, response consistency, and identity strength relative to fragmentation and external distortion pressures. This model provides a foundation for analyzing resilience and failure dynamics in distributed human systems. The findings suggest that identity-mediated coordination is a persistent and scalable solution to systemic fragmentation, extending beyond historical or urban contexts. Comparable architectures are observable in decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), digital identity networks, insurgent systems, and platform-based communities. As modern systems experience increasing fragmentation, identity-based governance structures may represent a primary adaptive pathway for achieving long-term coordination and structural persistence. This work contributes to interdisciplinary discussions in systems theory, sociology, political science, and complexity studies by reframing identity not as a cultural byproduct, but as a functional infrastructure for distributed governance under constraint.
This paper examines Web3 ecosystems not merely as markets for digital assets, but as networked social spaces where economic transactions give rise to enduring social ties, shared narratives, and collective identities. Leveraging large-scale data mining of fused on-chain blockchain transactions and off-chain social media activity, we analyze over one hundred NFT collections to uncover how different forms of participation structure community formation in decentralized environments. Using network analysis, we identify distinct ecosystem roles, such as long-term holders, active traders, and short-term speculators, and demonstrate how each produces markedly different network topologies, levels of cohesion, and pathways for influence. We complement this structural analysis with discourse analysis of social media engagement, revealing how narrative production, visibility, and sustained interaction persist even as transactional activity declines. Our findings show that communities centered on holding behavior evolve from transactional networks into socially embedded ecosystems characterized by dense ties, decentralized influence, and ongoing cultural participation, while trader- and speculator-dominated networks remain fragmented and transactional. By linking network structure with discursive dynamics, this study provides a sociotechnical framework for understanding how value, identity, and inequality are negotiated in Web3 spaces. The approach offers a scalable method for detecting patterns of inclusion, exclusion, and representational imbalance, advancing network-based research on digital communities beyond purely economic or technical accounts.
The "Decentralized Autonomous Organization" (DAO) was promised as the future of human coordination. In practice, it has devolved into a digitized version of 19th-century plutocracy. The industry standardâ"One Token, One Vote"âmeans that governance is strictly a function of wealth. A single "Whale" or a Centralized Exchange can outvote 10,000 active contributors. This leads to "Voter Apathy" (participation rates < 5%) and "Governance Attacks" (Flash Loan exploits). The Klyrox Protocol productizes its governance layer as a service: Meritocracy-as-a-Service (MaaS). We offer a plug-and-play Governance SDK that allows any DAO to import the "Klyrox Score." By weighting votes based on Epistemic History (Work) and Time-Lock Duration (Commitment) rather than just Token Quantity (Capital), we allow organizations to transition from "Shareholder Supremacy" to "Stakeholder Sovereignty."
Open access
Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability
This Article presents the first systematic empirical analysis of institutional architecture across decentralized autonomous organizations. Forty operational DAOs spanning eight industry segments: investment and DeFi, base-layer infrastructure, data and analytics, decentralized science, oracles and tooling, civic and political coordination, NFT collectibles, and gaming and virtual worlds. These segments are evaluated against a thirteen-category institutional rubric derived from the Calcaterra-Kaal framework. The framework synthesizes Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, the Folk Theorems of repeated games, and Incomplete Contract Theory into a proof that rule stability is institutionally self-defeating and that cooperative governance requires architecture that governs its own evolution. Five institutional patterns hold across every segment of the dataset. First, a visibility paradox: categories that produce visible artifacts (token launches, treasury balances, marketplace activity) score consistently above the midpoint, while categories that produce invisible governance infrastructure (legal wrappers, judicial branches, AI alignment policies, on-chain reputation ledgers) score consistently below it. Second, a universal AI-governance vacuum: AI Alignment scores 2.10 of 10 dataset-wide with no DAO scoring above 5, the only category in the framework where no entity crosses the midpoint. Third, token-plutocracy as the default governance form, with dataset-wide Decentralization at 5.17 and no production deployment of reputation-weighted on-chain aggregation. Fourth, legal-wrapper heterogeneity without convergence: eight distinct wrapper structures appear across the forty entities, with only one DAO using the Wyoming DAO LLC statute. Fifth, a convergent architectural agenda for institutional repair built around five upgrades: ERC-1155 multi-token reputation, tripartite separation of powers, stablecoin treasury infrastructure, weighted directed acyclic graph historiography, and values-drift detection. The unweighted dataset mean of 67.3 of 130 (51.8 percent) is the central quantitative finding: the median DAO has implemented roughly half of the institutional architecture the framework prescribes, with a projected post-upgrade mean of 95.3 representing a 42 percent improvement available through the convergent agenda. The deficit is structural rather than incidental. DAO architecture has solved the problems for which it was originally designed, decentralized capital formation and programmable value transfer, and has not yet solved the problems that emerged after its design, AI-mediated governance, Sybil-resistant identity, and constitutional separation of powers. The visibility paradox explains the under-investment: invisible institutional infrastructure is systematically underprovided relative to visible institutional infrastructure even when the invisible infrastructure is more predictive of long-run resilience. The Article develops implications for legal scholars, regulators, and DAO operators.
Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) represent a novel organizational form designed to enable collective decision-making without formal hierarchy. Despite their decentralized design, many DAOs exhibit tendencies toward centralization in the governance process. This study explains this governance paradox via the lens of transaction cost economics (TCE), highlighting how human asset specificity contributes to the emergence of centralized governance structures in settings where formal authority is absent. Specifically, we argue that human asset specificity, assessed through the technicality, complexity, and readability of governance proposals, is associated with a higher degree of centralization in the governance of DAOs. We test our hypotheses using a novel dataset of 3,807 proposals across major decentralized finance (DeFi) DAOs. Consistent with the predictions of TCE, empirical analyses show that proposals characterized by higher technicality, higher complexity, and lower readability are associated with higher levels of centralization. These results imply the relevance of TCE for governance in decentralized organizations-a novel form of organizations and offer practical guidance for protocol designers seeking to preserve decentralization in DAOs.
Dec 23, 2025·Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Oliver Alexy, Oliver Baumann, Ying-Ying Hsieh, Giorgia SampĂł
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) represent a radical form of socio-technical systems, where rules are enforced by code and governance is conducted by a distributed network of stakeholders. A critical challenge in designing these systems is achieving consensus without centralized authority, yet how consensus ensures effective governance remains underexplored. This study investigates the design of DAO governance systems, utilizing data from 70 DAOs and applying Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to explore which consensus configurations lead to positive organizational outcomes. Our analysis challenges the notion of a single consensus model. Instead, we uncover 13 distinct configurations that characterize successful DAOs. Our key finding reveals a fundamental âideation-legitimation trade-offâ: successful DAOs optimize for broad participation in either the proposal (ideation) stage or the voting (legitimation) stage, but rarely both. These insights provide a nuanced framework for understanding and designing effective governance systems for DAOs.
Blockchain is one of the most consequential innovations since the world wide web. Although blockchain is argued to remove, displace, or redistribute expertise, there is little understanding of the role of expertise in blockchain ecosystems, and more generally the expertise that fuels the development of new technologies by means of open, fluid, and heterogeneous knowledge contributions. An empirical study of the social organization of the Ethereum community, the second largest blockchain ecosystem after Bitcoin, reveals the contrasting tensions involved in setting up a system of decentralized expertise. The alternate community mantras ârough consensus, running codeâ and âwide consensus, better code?â suggest that the Ethereum community enacts expertise centralization and decentralization practices simultaneously to create a fragile balance between individualized accountabilities and a generalized sense of diffused participation. These practices unfold along a continuum of routine operations punctuated by critical events and are both essential for navigating the uncertainties of decentralized organizations. The study contributes to research on new forms of expertise occasioned by emerging technologies, and in particular to our understanding of blockchain expertise. The studyâs relational perspective on expertise adds to research on the dynamics of knowledge de/centralization in online communities.
Junliang Luo, Katrin Tinn, ĆengĂŒl Duran, Di Wu · 5 authors
Tokenized U.S. Treasuries have emerged as a prominent subclass of real-world assets (RWAs), offering cryptographically secured, yield-bearing instruments issued across multi-chain Web3 infrastructures, with growing significance for transparency, accessibility, and financial inclusion. While the market has expanded rapidly, empirical analyses of transaction-level behaviours remain limited. This paper conducts a quantitative, function-level dissection of U.S. Treasury-backed RWA tokens, including BUIDL, BENJI, and USDY across multi-chain: mostly Ethereum and Layer-2s. Decoded contract calls expose core financial primitives such as issuance, redemption, transfer, and bridging, revealing patterns that distinguish institutional participants from smaller or retail users for the extent and limits of inclusivity in current RWA adoption. To infer address-level economic roles, we introduce a curvature-aware representation learning model. Our method outperforms baseline models in role inference on our collected U.S. Treasury transaction dataset and generalizes to address classification across broader public blockchain transaction datasets. The decoded transaction-level patterns in tokenized U.S. Treasuries across chains surface the degree of retail participation, and the role inference model enables the distinction between institutional treasuries, arbitrage bots, and retail traders based on behavioral patterns, facilitating future more transparent, inclusive, and accountable Web3 finance.
Purpose Effective crisis management is essential for all organizations, and both traditional and self-managed organizational structures have their advantages and challenges when dealing with a crisis. Decision-making in self-managed organizations (SMO) can be faster, however, the lack of clear chains of command can hinder strategic direction and coordination of resources. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential for a hybrid model of the self-managed organization, considering the opportunities and drawbacks of both traditional and self-managed organizational structures in terms of crisis. Design/methodology/approach This paper reviews the literature on crisis in traditional and SMO and considers the potential for a hybrid model of the self-managed organization. Findings SMO offers speed and flexibility through decentralized decision-making, however, they can struggle with coordination during large-scale crises, whereas traditional hierarchical structures provide clear command chains and centralized control but may be slower due to bottlenecks. To address this, the authors propose a hybrid model that combines the strengths of both systems, enabling organizations to operate with the agility of SMO during normal conditions and seamlessly shift to a traditional command structure during crises. Such an approach seeks to optimize responsiveness and coordination based on situational demands, although further research is needed to develop and test such a model. Originality/value This work proposed a hybrid self-managed organizational model that can dynamically switch between decentralized and centralized structures based on the demands of a situation, something existing models such as Holacracy or Teal do not accommodate. Unlike prior approaches that advocate either fully autonomous or hierarchical systems, this paper introduces a flexible operational framework that integrates the strengths of both, aiming to optimize decision-making speed and coordination during crises. This concept challenges the rigidity of current models and opens new avenues for adaptive organizational design.
This paper uses the concept of transpoiesis to describe the mechanisms that sustain social movements. Emerging from ethnographic research on the World Social Forum (WSF) and inspired by systems theory, transpoiesis emphasizes the dynamic balance within social movements between decentralized organization and strategic coherence. This differentiates it from autopoiesis, which focuses on self-sustaining systems that maintain and reproduce their structure autonomously through internal processes, rather than emphasizing the dynamic balance between decentralized organization and strategic coherence. Transpoiesis offers a particularly instructive model in the digital age, when classical explanations often fail to account for the rapid pace of change, innovation, flexibility and decentralized collaboration that characterize modern organizations. The concept aids in understanding how social movements build collective identities, navigate organizational dynamics, structure collective learning, and contribute to social change. Moreover, it reflects the broader shift toward network-based arrangements in contemporary organizations, an adaptation to the complexities of the digital environment.
This chapter examines how Web3 technologies like blockchain and the metaverse are transforming organizational functions and business models. The metaverse is enhancing human resource processes such as recruitment through immersive job previews, virtual interviews/job fairs, and innovative training via VR simulations, gamification, and AI assistants. In manufacturing, the industrial metaverse enables cost savings, quality improvements, flexibility, faster delivery, and sustainability by leveraging capabilities like digital twins and real-time facility reconfigurations. Web3 and the metaverse are reshaping business models by providing immersive digital marketing channels and virtual product testing grounds, especially appealing to Gen Z. Companies are generating new revenue streams through metaverse initiatives like Nike's Nikeland featuring virtual goods sold as NFTs. The blockchain's trustless verification can prevent opportunistic behavior in interorganizational relationships by transparently enforcing agreements. Examples include using NFTs to certify product data impacting resale value and incentivizing authorized after-sales service channels.
Abstract In this contribution to the Organization Zoo series, we examine Buurtzorg, a highly successful Dutch home care organization with over 14 thousand employees that operates without any supervisors or middle management. Given its size, it is a rare example of a self-managing organization that has radically decentralized decision-making to empower autonomous teams to operate highly independently while growing to thousands of employees. Buurtzorgâs case sheds light on the role of supportive structures, including purpose-built information and communication technology and a small team of internal coaches, that the firm uses to scale up a self-managing organization of over 900 independent teams.