Governing Markets as Knowledge Commons

In this volume we propose conceptualizing market sustaining social infrastructures as a knowledge commons while focusing on entrepreneurial activities that help govern, alter, and sustain these knowledge commons. We are interested in analyzing actions and interactions through which agents create, cultivate and sustain (or harm and destroy) market enabling conventions and norms; we hope to better understand, for example, when and why would entrepreneurs abide by existing rules and when might they rebel against them. We ask how do entrepreneurs envision and effectuate future opportunities under institutional uncertainty, how do they transform and assemble different kinds of resources, including the various kinds of knowledge commons, and how do they legitimize novelty.

The edited volume brings together theoretical and empirical approaches that develop and apply the theory of commons governance to the evolution of shared knowledge structures necessary to sustain markets. We propose a volume that will contribute and develop the Governing-Knowledge-Commons (GKC) research program including both theoretical analyses of the joint production and reproduction of market sustaining social infrastructures as well as case studies illustrating the complementary nature and the co-evolution of the “play of the game” and “the rules of the game” thus connecting the GKC research framework with the New Entrepreneurial History.