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Authors: Paula Ungureanu
Year: 2025
Journal:Research in the Sociology of Organizations
Abstract: 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 "rough consensus, running code" and "wide consensus, better code?" 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 study's relational perspective on expertise adds to research on the dynamics of knowledge decentralization in online communities.
Read moreAuthors: Paula Ungureanu, Francesca Bellasia, Carlotta Cochis
Year: 2025
Journal:Technological Forecasting and Social Change
Abstract: Smart Contracts are programs running logic in the Blockchain network by executing operations through immutable transactions. The This study investigates an emblematic case of innovation failure in blockchains as to understand how turbulent episodes of innovation failure shape the socio-technical organization of digital ecosystems. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (The DAO) was an alternative model of organizational governance based on the Ethereum blockchain which registered one of the biggest successes in crowdfunding history and fell victim to one of the biggest hacks of the crypto world. Our empirical qualitative study combines interviews, archival and social media data to develop a grounded theory on how innovation failure was framed and dealt with in the Ethereum ecosystem. Our findings highlight the key role of blaming processes following innovation failures in digital ecosystems. Building on blame theory, we theorize about the interplay between human and technological blaming, and document a process called multi-distributed blaming whereby actors circle between multiple blames to an ecosystem's human and technological components, with multi-level (i.e., organizational and technological) consequences for the ecosystem. By adopting a socio-technical perspective, our findings contribute to blame theories, to the literature on digital ecosystems and to the scant research on blockchain organization.
Read moreAuthors: Paula Ungureanu
Year: 2024
Journal: Journal of Openness, Commons & Organizing
Read moreAuthors: Franceso Salzano, Simone Scalabrino, Rocco Oliveto, R. Pareschi
Year: 2024
Conference: Internation Conference in Mining Software Repositories
Abstract: Smart Contracts are programs running logic in the Blockchain network by executing operations through immutable transactions. The Blockchain network validates such transactions, storing them into sequential blocks of which integrity is ensured. Smart Contracts deal with value stakes, if a damaging transaction is validated, it may never be reverted, leading to unrecoverable losses. To prevent this, security aspects have been explored in several fields, with research providing catalogs of security defects, secure code recommendations, and possible solutions to fix vulnerabilities. In our study, we refer to vulnerability fixing in the ways found in the literature as guidelines. However, it is not clear to what extent developers adhere to these guidelines, nor whether there are other viable common solutions and what they are. The goal of our research is to fill knowledge gaps related to developers’ observance of existing guidelines and to propose new and viable solutions to security vulnerabilities. To reach our goal, we will obtain from Solidity GitHub repositories the commits that fix vulnerabilities included in the DASP TOP 10 and we will conduct a manual analysis of fixing approaches employed by developers. Our analysis aims to determine the extent to which literature-based fixing strategies are followed. Additionally, we will identify and discuss emerging fixing techniques not currently documented in the literature. Through qualitative analysis, we will evaluate the suitability of these new fixing solutions and discriminate between valid approaches and potential mistakes.
Read moreAuthors: Giuliano Lemme
Year: 2024
Conference: Wine Tourism and the Law-Ist World Congress
Read moreAuthors: Paula Ungureanu and Carlotta Cochis
Year: 2023
Journal: Association for Information Systems
Abstract:Technological hypes have always characterized societies because new technologies afford to do things previously thought to be beyond the grasp of humanity. One of the main mechanisms of hype creation is the prefiguration of social disruption: making visible in the present the image of a desired or ideal condition of social change in the future using public talk, symbolization, and commoditization. The consequence is the "future industries" creation of predic- tions and prophecies by actors involved with the emergent hype. As the hype rises, these actors use the means of the present to perform the desired ends of the future, such that "real utopias" or "as-if realities" emerge as tangible, embodied, and inhabited. This study unpacks how hypes about emergent digital technolgies, particularly blockchain technology, are shaped by actors’ efforts to navigate multiple logics to pursue the promise of social disruption. It studies how entrepreneurs’ and media’s different prefigurative strategies contributed to the emer- gence of hype around the field of blockchain for social good. Specifically, it doc- uments the importance of technological logic to integrate and reconcile multiple logics (market and community) and different prefiguration strategies (long-term and short-term) enacted by different actors (i.e., ventures and the media) in the emergent market. We contribute to the literature on hypes in entrepreneurship, the role of multimodality in entrepreneurship, and multiple logic work in emergent digital fields by highlighting the role of prefiguration and the understudied role of technology as a societal logic with constitutive and performative effects.
Read moreAuthors: Giuliano Lemme
Year: 2023
Journal: DIRITTO DELLA BANCA E DEL MERCATO FINANZIARIO
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