Potentialities and limitations of blockchain technologies in the governance of social enterprise collectives: the case of Smart Ibérica

Publications

“It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism.”

― Angela Y. Davis

Potentialities and limitations of blockchain technologies in the governance of social enterprise collectives: the case of Smart Ibérica

David Rozas, Silvia Díaz-Molina

Social Enterprise (SE) scholars have explored the complexity behind the governance of SE collectives, including polycentricity, high degrees of autonomy, decision-making processes not based on capital ownership and a strong participatory culture. Parallelisms can be found between these characteristics and those from the studies on the governance of Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) collectives. Firstly, we identify connections between the governance of SE and previously studied CBPP collectives, focussing on the similar challenges faced by these two types of collectives when aiming to scale up their governance processes. Secondly, we discuss the potentialities and limitations of blockchain technologies — a distributed and append-only ledger which enables the implementation of novel properties at an infrastructural level in a fully decentralised manner — to create conditions which may facilitate the scaling up of governance processes in SE collectives. Concretely: “How can blockchain technologies help to scale up the governance of SE collectives?”