Welcome to the homepage of Dariusz Jemielniak.
I am a (full) professor of organization studies at Kozminski University, a chair MINDS (Management in Networked and Digital Societies) department, Berkman Center for Internet and Society fellow at Harvard University, and a visiting scholar at MIT‘s Center for Collective Intelligence. I also currently serve on the Board of Trustees of Wikimedia Foundation.
Some links:
Dariusz Jemielniak’s profile on Academia.edu.
You can reach me at dariusz.jemielniak email functioning in fulbrightmail.org domain.
Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia is out!
I’m very happy and excited to report that the results of my six-year research project are out in the first fully ethnographic account of Wikipedia community, by Stanford University Press (2014): Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia. The book won the 2015 Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture.
So far it has been reviewed at:
– Forbes: How Wikipedia Really Works: An Insider’s Wry, Brave Account by George Anders,
– Motherboard: An Ethnographic Study of the Wikipedia Hive Mind by Roisin Kiberd,
– Pacific Standard:Who Killed Wikipedia? by Virginia Postrel,
– Inside HigherEd:Common Knowledge: Jemielniak on Wikipedia by Barbara Fister,
– Scandinavian Journal of Management review by Barbara Czarniawska,
–Issues in Science and Technology Wiki-ki yay? Not so fast by G. Pascal Zachary,
–Anthropology of Work Review review by Samuel G. Collins,
– Wikipedia Signpost: Knowledge or unreality? by Ira Brad Matetsky,
– The Wikipedian: Making the Sausage: Dariusz Jemielniak on How to Think About Edit Wars by William Beutler,
–European Management Review: by Dorota Bourne,
– Clay Spinuzzi’s blogReading: Common knowledge?.
Related op-eds have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, and The Daily Dot.
Endorsements for the book:
– “Common Knowledge?” is the first fully ethnographic study of Wikipedia culture. This thoughtful and intellectually provocative study sheds new light on a community behind the largest collaborative movement of humankind, and is a must-read for all interested in open collaboration movement.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia
– This is a trailblazing study of Wikipedia—a phenomenon that is so much in our daily lives, while remaining mysterious to most of us. We should be thankful to Jemielniak for this study. As a seasoned user, an insider, and a scholar, his thorough account introduces us to Wikipedia’s inner mechanisms, productive processes, quality controls, splendors, and miseries as a treasury of knowledge that is without precedence and, increasingly, without competition.
Zygmunt Bauman, Professor Emeritus of University of Leeds
– Jemielniak confronts the fascinating politics of Wikipedia as an insider, relaying the healthy clash of cultures and values as people try to get it right — or at least get it to represent their dearly-held views. This is a wonderful, detailed account of Wikipedia’s rules and hierarchies, culture of consensus, internal power structures, and governance and leadership, especially for its English and Polish incarnations.
Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law and Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University; Author of The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It (2008)
Of all the social artifacts we’ve built on top of the internet, Wikipedia is at once the strangest and the most familiar. Half a billion people visit every month, but almost no one knows how it works or why. Dariusz Jemielniak has written a thoughtful and multi-faceted account of Wikipedia’s culture, contradictions and challenges.
Clay Shirky, Professor of New York University; Author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (2010), and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008)
Wikipedia is breathtakingly important, but it’s new enough that it hasn’t been studied much yet. This well-informed, thoughtful book from management professor and longtime Wikipedian Dariusz Jemielniak takes readers behind the scenes, exploring how Wikipedia works and why it matters. It’s an important addition to the existing literature.
Sue Gardner, 2007-2014 Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation
My previous book on the new knowledge workers
The New Knowledge Workers (2012, Edward Elgar)
…The author’s thoughtful comparative approach, contrasting the oft-studied American knowledge workers with their less familiar Polish counterparts, offers a refreshing take on the post industrial workplace and demonstrates once again the profound changes that high-tech work has made in the nature of work, the worker and the workplace, far beyond Silicon Valley.
Gideon Kunda, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Being able to bring together ethnographic research and organization theory and social science more broadly, The New Knowledge Workers is a significant contribution to the understanding of contemporary working life in the so-called “knowledge society”.
Alexander Styhre, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Jemielniak’s book combines detailed comparative ethnographic observations with organizational analysis to highlight how little we actually know about the operations of knowledge-intensive organizations
Davydd J. Greenwood, Cornell University, US
You are welcome to visit TAMARA Journal for Critical Organization Inquiry‘s website (2011-2015 I was its editor-in-chief).
Since I am a strongly devoted Polish Desk Chief for Annals of Improbable Research magazine, awarding Ig Nobel Prizes, I invite you to visit its website for research that makes people laugh and then think.