Summary
Delve into the question of “what is a DAO” and propose 5 different conceptual perspectives that allow us to more effectively coordinate and research existing organizations.
These 5 different concepts are:
01 DAO as a collective organization
A DAO, as a multi-agent system, has interconnected instances of decision-making, where agents group decisions into a collective entity (DAO) that declares, states, and references (i.e., speech acts) what the entity is or can do.
02 DAO as an entity
A representation of the process by which its agents (human and non-human) communicate with each other at a specific point in time.
03 DAO as a process
A DAO is a collective process of constant change and evolution (toward a specific goal and influenced by a specific culture or spirit).
04 DAO as communication
DAO as a communication activity (human and computer language) between DAO agents.
05 DAO as a spiritual system
As an emerging complex adaptive system, DAO was (re)created as a social thought and formed a spiritual and cultural system.
Combining the above 5 concepts with the conclusions of over 150 voters who participated in the “What is a DAO” proposal, we propose the following definitions:
The DAO is a collective that exhibits organized, fosters development through the exchange of activities and process expression, and is shaped by unique values.
Decentralized power: There is no single source of power
Autonomy: self-mastery, not bound by external coercive forces
Have a common goal, vision, or set of values that you are working towards
A shared vault controlled by a decentralized voting mechanism
Some advice before discussing the basic concepts of DAO
Before discussing the “what”, we need to understand the “why”.
Simply put, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs for short) are changing the way organizations are defined and thought about. Recently, the DAO has taken center stage almost everywhere in Forbes articles (Forbes, 2022), the World Economic Forum (WEF Agenda, 2022), most notably at a recent Sotheby’s auction (BBC News, 2021), a The DAO raised nearly $50 million and used it to try to buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution.
But looking at these articles, there is no generally agreed definition of what a DAO is. Examples of some of these definitions are:
“A community owned by members without centralized leadership. A safe way to collaborate with strangers on the internet. A safe place to put money into a specific cause.” – Ethereum.org
“A collective decision-making using automation and crowdsourcing” – The Economist
“An entity that seeks to replicate the decision-making activities of traditional organizations without the structure and costs of traditional organizations” – Forbes
“A Community With Shared Bank Accounts” – Huling (2021)
These definitions illustrate a common problem. The DAO has become a meme and is used to describe everything.
In exploring this concept, we need the courage to dare not be afraid of difficulties, and the ability to go straight to the root cause of the problem, directly addressing the contradiction between the utility that a common definition can provide and the richness that DAO’s various metaphors bring.
While the exploration of different perspectives on “how to design a DAO” could encompass broader analytical perspectives (e.g. law, economics, etc.), our research focuses on clarifying the ultimate purpose of a DAO (goal, purpose, fulfillment) so that we can Provides a foundational concept to build upon.
History of DAOs
The DAO inherits rich narratives from social movements and organizations throughout history. Organization theorists Samer Hassan and Primavera De Filippi (in their paper on Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) point to numerous references to DAOs prior to DAOs (Shubik, 1962; Beckhard, 1966; Freeland & Baker, 1975 ).
More broadly, multiple ideas related to DAOs have emerged in previous narratives, as pointed out by Nathan Scheinder (2014). “Since the 1970s, the urge for decentralization and self-government movements has permeated the entire social movement”.
Some of the key DAO-related examples described above are:
Cooperatives and stakeholder capitalism (recorded since 1769): Ownership is distributed among labor providers and governed by multiple stakeholders (as opposed to being governed entirely by shareholders).
The gig economy and platforming (quoted as early as 1905 by jazz musicians, spread over the Internet since 1995): fluid contract practices, internal markets, and (digital) platforms focused on facilitating the participation of other players.
Self-management and blue-green organizations (documented as early as the 1950s): autonomous teams, networked organizational structures, wholeness, self-management, and evolutionary purpose.
Digitization and process automation: Eliminate tedious or repetitive tasks and use software to facilitate processes.
Anarchism, liberalism, cyberpunk and anti-capitalist movements (related to Taoism in ancient China, already mentioned in Greece in the 5th century BC): self-governance and self-government, external violence and control (especially the state ) resistance.
Evolution of the DAO concept
The earliest mention of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) may be attributed to computer scientist W. Dilger (1997), who described a multi-agent system in the Internet of Things (IoT) environment. However, Dilger’s framework differs from later definitions because it is entirely centered on non-human agents interacting through digital signals.
The modern usage of DAO has a strong human element, as it describes the interaction and coordination between people. Hassan and De Fillipe (2021) mentioned this human coordination aspect of DAOs. They argue that the modern significance of DAOs can be traced back to the early concept of Decentralized Autonomous Corporations (DACs).
“The DAC concept was mostly used informally by early cryptocurrency enthusiasts in online forums and chats, using ‘decentralized’ and ‘distributed’ autonomous companies interchangeably. It wasn’t until 2013 that the term became more widely adopted , and are discussed publicly on various websites (D. Larimer, 2013a; D. Larimer, 2013b).”
Furthermore, in A History of the DAO, Kei argues that, by 2014, the DAO was described as “a capitalized organization in which software protocols inform its operations, putting automation at the center and humans at the edge”. Kei then further added, “As the DAO went from theory to experiment, the community largely repurposed the term DAO to mean ‘unstoppable,’ or censorship-resistant enterprise”.
Unstoppable or censorship-resistant qualities continued to define the first generation of DAOs, the first of which was The DAO — an investment organization that raised $150 million (DuPont 2017).
From this moment on, the industry has faced explosive growth and has become increasingly diverse, including DeFI, NFTs, and other verticals that are now emerging. The question of how to define a DAO has multiplied as more and more people flocked to the field and new organizations began to emerge.
Can we agree on defining a DAO?
DAOs have grown to include a large number of entities, so there needs to be a defined scope. However, there is momentum to bring all these changes under the same umbrella, the word DAO. Our goal is to provide a conceptual foundation and meaningful definition for researching and operating DAOs in order to bridge theory and practice.
DAO as a coordination mechanism
We explore more broadly the coordination between DAOs and (autonomous) agents seeking to satisfy specific needs and desires. Formally, we use the following definitions:
01 Coordination
“Managing dependencies between activities”
Malone and Crowstone (1994, p. 90)
02 Agent
“A system that resides within an environment, that is part of the environment, that perceives it and acts upon it over time”. For example, people, artificial intelligence or animals.
Franklin, S., Graesser, A. (1997)
At the intersection of politics and economics, within the framework of the type or variety of capitalism, different arrangements have been identified to “solve the problem of coordination between companies and their financiers, employees, suppliers and customers”.
Following this line of thought, Schneider, B. (2013) established four idealized forms of coordination
Hierarchy: Command-Based Coordination
Network: Trust-Based Coordination
Coordination: Negotiation-based coordination
Liberalism: Market-Based Coordination
While these are idealized concepts, they rarely exist in isolation, and different institutions use them in different combinations and proportions.
Organizational level coordination
The literature on organizational research covers networked organizations, traditional hierarchical organizations, gig economy (market) organizations, and self-managing organizations, among others, as well as other labels that use different combinations of the above coordination arrangements.
DAOs carry on this history but, as the name suggests, are described as a distinct type of organization, Decentralised Autonomous Organizations.
Faced with this argument, we can see two approaches.
The proposition is to study the uniqueness of DAOs to assess whether DAOs are indeed a new form of organization (using new coordination mechanisms or exploiting them in new ways).
What similarities can be studied conceptually to help us understand DAOs by leveraging existing theoretical foundations in the organizational research literature.
Over time, research into DAOs will likely cover both approaches. We will focus on the second approach (connecting conceptual tools to better understand DAOs) and will further examine theoretical divergences between DAOs and other organizations in the future.
DAO as a (problematic) organization
To build bridges of similarities for easier understanding, we start with a formal definition of an organization.
organize
Puranam, P. et al. (2014) identified the following consistent characteristics across definitions of multiple organizations:
A multi-agent system
identifiable boundaries
System-level goals (purposes)
Have an agent that can be formed and a desire to work hard to contribute
From a traditional organizational perspective, DAOs are inherently problematic because organizations “are simply unimaginable without reference to viable identities and boundaries” (March and Simon, 1958, cited by Schreyogg and Sydow, 2010, p. 1253). But in DAOs, boundaries are blurred, as was the case in a conversation between two participants at a recent DAO Camp event.
Mr. A: “How many people are in your DAO?”
Mr. B: “Um…”
[both participants laugh].
Mr. B: “It’s hard to say, but maybe the core is 8-12 people, then maybe 20-30 people”
Fluid membership and fluid contribution levels lead to schematization and subjectivization of membership rather than clear and identifiable boundaries. This creates the image that DAOs are constantly changing, constantly changing.
Additionally, system-level goals may also be less easily identified (or deliberately undefined), giving the impression that the organization is moving in different directions rather than toward a common goal. And some group members may be anonymous or pseudonymous, and they may maliciously influence the concept of contributing to a common goal (such as lurkers or malicious actors).
Contrasting the classical definition of an organization with the description of a DAO, DAOs seem to deviate from this model in that they have volatile boundaries, do not always have system-level goals, and may have members actively working against system-level goals and in It is designed to continue to exist as a member of the organization. So, strictly speaking, trying to fit a DAO into the traditional definition of an organization is really problematic.
Fortunately, the definition of an organization has also proven problematic when studying other social collectives (for example, is the hacker collective Anonymous an organization?), leading to a new concept proposed by Ahrne and Brunsson (2011): organization Sexuality – a more gradual differentiation than the traditional binary classification of organized or non-organized.
organizational
“Organization depends on the extent to which a social collective meets the minimum standards for what constitutes an organization (see also Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011).
Our concept of organization draws on the idea of the “organization” of social collectives, which is based on three criteria:
First, they are characterized by interconnected decision instances (Ahrne and Brunsson, 2011);
Second, these decision instances are attributed to collective entities or actors (King et al., 2010);
Third, collective identity is achieved through speech acts designed to describe what an entity or actor is or does (“identity claims”; see Bartel and Dutton, 2001).
This conceptualization emphasizes that the formation of collective identities (see Gioia et al., 2013; Hardy et al., 2005; Schultz and Hernes, 2013) is a key component of organization, especially (but not exclusively) in mobile social arrangements Medium”. L. Dobusch and D. Schoeneborn (2015)
Using organization, we can easily apply these three criteria to refine the definition of DAOs and distinguish them from groups or communities in social media that have no instances of decision-making. Contributors connect and communicate with each other in the DAO is used to coordinate actions. The definition of organization also refers to the concept of collective identity. This collective identity is predictably embodied in an ideal DAO.
Conceptually, we conclude that DAOs are social collectives that exhibit organization.
D&A spirit in DAO
DAOs infuse specific ideals in their names (e.g., decentralization, autonomy) and associated values (e.g. permissionless, trustless, transparent, etc.). These ideals are not fixed, but every DAO has the same ideals. Not only that, but there is a larger set of ideals, and each DAO is striving to live according to a subset of the ideals in this larger list, given the individual’s interpretation of those ideals and their desire to live an ideal life.
These ideals and values determine how DAO members coordinate their actions, define goals, and what motivates (or doesn’t). For example, in DAOs, tasks are typically not assigned by a small group of agents (i.e. leaders and managers), but by contributors (opt-in) themselves.
All in all, there is a set of ideas and values that define a DAO. In some cases, the pursuit and activation of these qualities becomes the explicit goal of DAOs, such as RnDAO, Aragon (as stated in their manifesto), etc.
Due to the cultural significance of these DAO characteristics (ideas and values), we refer to them as “spirits”.
Spirit
“The characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community, expressed in its attitudes and aspirations” – Speke and Lavroll (2002)
It is important to note that a shared spirit contributes to a shared identity, which in turn contributes to organization.
This helps us to expand the framework of DAO, including the following two aspects:
DAO as a collective with a certain organization
DAO is a spiritual pursuit
Before we dive into the specific spirit of DAOs, however, we must bridge a further paradox: when we talk about these qualities of DAOs, we are talking about uninterrupted pursuits, not just static reality. How do we solve this problem with the time component?
DAOs as entities and processes
Our goal is to enable DAOs and community designers and strategists to leverage and apply our research findings. Therefore, it is imperative that we be able to describe a DAO at a specific point in time and compare it to other DAOs (or the same DAOs in the past or future). In short, we need the ability to assert “what a DAO is” at a specific point in time.
DAOs have really come alive over time, but they are also constantly changing and (re)inventing themselves. Many “DAOs” are heavily influenced by the idea of progressive decentralization, starting with chaotic communities or centralized organizations, and over time adopting decentralized and autonomous organizational processes (e.g., leveraging blockchain technology to provide censorship) The governance process of resistance, enabling token holders to propose, vote, and transfer funds transactions without trusting any single individual to facilitate or execute). Additionally, DAOs are often viewed as evolving entities, with meta-governance processes that allow the DAO’s policies to evolve. Therefore, any meaningful description of a DAO also needs to frame it as change and transformation: a DAO is a process.
Essentially, we need to build a bridge between the concrete needs of the entity (how the DAO is at a point in time) and the process (how the DAO changes over time), while also evolving within itself to build a bridge between the mechanisms and principles.
Here, we can utilize the concept of metaphor or lens as a well-tested conceptual tool in organizational research (we will examine the applicability to organizational concepts along the way).
Metaphors are tools for conceptualizing DAOs
As the Framework Institute puts it, “Metaphors provide a new mental framework for us to think about and talk about a topic…and can lead to fruitless conversations and repetitive debates”.
Metaphors are “a useful component of efforts to change the interpretive frameworks that people access and use when processing information”, including DAOs (Erard, 2012). By using metaphors to “enhance our understanding of abstraction or culturally innovative phenomena”, we can advance ideas and avoid refuting talking points that prevent progressive change (Erard, 2012).
In his seminal book “Images of Organization” (latest edition 2006), Gareth Morgan offers 8 different metaphors for organizational maps.
Morgan’s 8 Organizational Metaphors
“Each of the eight metaphors that Morgan proposes in his book encompasses a set or set of organizational theories, as follows:
Machine metaphors encompass theories such as Taylor’s scientific management, Weber’s bureaucracy, and organizational perspectives that emphasize closed systems, efficiency, and the mechanical character of organizations.
The metaphor of the organism describes the organization as an open system, focusing on interpersonal relationships and contingency theory.
Brain metaphors focus on the cognitive characteristics of organizations and include learning theories and cybernetics.
Cultural metaphors emphasize the symbolic and informal aspects of organization and the creation of shared meanings among actors.
Political system metaphors include stakeholder theory, diversity of interests, conflict and power in organizations.
The “spiritual prison” metaphor comes from psychoanalytic theory to examine the mind, the subconscious, and the way organizations trap their members.
Flow and transition metaphors emphasize process, self-referentiality, and unpredictability through theories that embrace autopoiesis, chaos, and complexity in organizations.
The instrumental metaphor of domination draws on Marxism and critical theory to highlight the exploitation, control, and unequal distribution of power within and within organizations. (Örtenblad et al., 2016)
The challenge we face is how to choose the right metaphor (for example, do we call the DAO an organism or a machine, a community or…?)
DAO’s metaphorical requirements
An effective metaphor describes or represents an abstract goal through a more concrete, detailed, and understandable source. For example, conceptualizing an organization as a machine (Tsoukas, 1991: 566) creates images of various moving and interconnected knobs and bolts. For the machine (and therefore the organization) to function, everything needs to work together smoothly.
Given the paradox of the DAO as an entity (at a particular point in time) and as a process (the entity is constantly evolving), we need to understand the nature of a fluid and changing organization (metaphors that lead us to fluidity and transformation) ) and a more “tangible” organization as a mechanical, almost fixed entity (a metaphor that leads us to machines).
Given that we conceptualize DAOs as organizational collectives (rather than traditional organizations), we need to examine the compatibility of the chosen metaphor with open and loosely defined boundaries and three key characteristics of organizational collectives.
Although Morgan’s metaphors provide a rich context for exploring organizations, “many of Morgan’s metaphors refer to entities (eg, machines, organisms, brains), and one of them refers to processes (flow and transformation).” (Jermier and Forbes (2016) and Schoeneborn et al. (2016) citing Örtenblad et al. (2016)).
Schoeneborn et al. (2016) explore how to bridge the paradox of organizations as processes (variable, abstract) and entities (fixed, concrete). Their research led them to highlight the communicative value of conceptualizing organizations as a solution to paradoxes.
DAO as a Communication
“When I imagine an organization in my mind…it is an interlocking network of communication processes” (Taylor, 2003:12)
Communication as the primary mechanism for creating (sharing) meaning and fulfilling all three fundamental organizational criteria: referencing the existence of the collective (i.e. making an identity claim), making decisions as a collective and classifying those decisions as a collective, and generally describing What the collective is or does.
Communication is also a key mechanism for achieving other attributes of the organization, such as defining system-level goals and coordinating the achievement of those goals.
Specifically, conceptualizing a DAO through communication provides us with a number of features:
Communicating events and processes are observable phenomena that can be described and designed (eg, by direct action, facilitation, or push). Therefore, this metaphor gives us a very concrete level to map the DAO’s journey and informs future DAO design choices.
Likewise, the communication metaphor allows us to describe a specific point in time, while also acknowledging that the organization is recreated at each moment by the agents engaged in the aforementioned conversation. If communication stops, the organization ceases to develop and cease to exist as an entity, because it is through communication that the organization is created and transformed.
Importantly, our definition of communication is broad, including:
Communicate through technology-mediated processes: use code and algorithms as intermediaries in the communication process (including silently reacting to an article, logging into a tool, etc.), and using tokens, avatars, etc. to convey value, Concepts of ownership, status, etc.
Communicate through systems: communicate processes (such as defined workflows, processes, rules, and systems) and communicate events (events and collections that may have formed).
Communication between agents: including autonomous and non-autonomous entities (eg, humans, other organizations, and algorithms or tools).
and anonymous or pseudonymous communications (through technology).
Thus, using DAOs as communication, we can observe communication patterns in the collective, such as communication events, communication processes, and generate images of entities “as they are” (current communication events and processes) and how they change (meaning of said communication) .
Now let’s use these foundations to explore how spirits work in DAOs.
The role of “spirits” in DAOs
Monge and Contractor (2003) proposed complexity theory to explain the evolution of communication networks.
Monge and Contractors (2003) define a complex system as a network of agents, each with a set of properties that follow interaction rules, resulting in emergent structures (p. 241).
From this we can conclude that DAOs, as communication networks, obey the principles of complex systems, including emergent structures. Therefore, it is important to use the seminal work of Donella Meadows to demonstrate the role of spirit in the unfolding DAO.
Where interventions are made in a system (in order of increasing effectiveness):
constants, parameters, numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards)
Regulate negative feedback loops
Drive positive feedback loops
Node where material flow and material intersect
Information Flow
Rules of the system (incentives, penalties, constraints)
Distribution of power over system rules
system goals
The system – its goals, power structures, rules, culture – produces a mindset or paradigm
Donella Meadows (1999)
Spirit represents the first point of intervention in a system. Thus, the spirit directly shapes the emergent patterns and structures we see in DAOs. And, as we’ll see next, the ethos of the DAO directly dictates design choices in goal setting, power distribution, information flow, and more. Simply put, the spirit shapes the DAO.
Describing Spiritual DAOs: The Pursuit of DAO “Qualities”
While the DAO concept was formed in the 2010s with associated values and ideals, as we saw in the DAO History section, the DAO ethos has deeper roots. By 2022, as adoption increases and tools mature, the scope of DAO conceptualization has increased significantly, and some early narratives have diverged. In order to grasp the current situation, we created a proposal. Take “what makes a DAO a DAO” and distribute it through our network and multiple DAO exchange platforms.
By June 2022, more than 150 voluntary participants had rated the statement (agree/disagree/pass) and were allowed to add their own. The outcome metrics at the time of writing are:
Participant groups: 155
Voters: 1,829 votes
Statements submitted: 31
Participants agreed that DAOs have at least these properties. Consensus means that at least 64% of participants agree with these statements:
Decentralized power: There is no single source of power.
Autonomy: Self-mastery, not bound by external coercive forces.
Have a common goal, vision, or set of values that you are working towards.
A shared vault controlled by a decentralized voting mechanism.
Among the participants, 96 formed two distinct groups. The rest of the participants could not be placed into a consensus group.
Group A (44 participants) strongly disagreed that the DAO was crowdfunded, while Group B (52 participants) did not believe it was an important characteristic of a DAO. People in group B believed that, in addition to the 4 statements listed above, the qualities of dao include
Open Politics (Instead of Hidden Agenda)
Horizontal organization, working groups take turns leading, and staff have decision-making power in the overall strategy
Conclusion: Propose the DAO concept
We first introduced various definitions and understandings of DAO, traced the origin of the DAO concept, and regarded DAO as the core idea in the coordination mechanism. In this respect, they are similar to organizations. When organizations coordinate activities between people, many DAOs differentiate themselves by the lack of solid boundaries and specific ethos (the collective thinking and paradigms of members) between the organization and the environment. We conclude that while DAOs are not organizations (in the traditional sense), they are collective and demonstrate that they achieve some degree of organization by communicating events and process formulation.
In addition to being organizational, we define a DAO as two static entities that evolve simultaneously and strive to maintain certain values (a spirit). Conceptualizing a DAO as a communication network allows us to resolve the contradictions (between what is and what will be) between current entities and their constant evolution. In the end, we found that shaping the ethos of DAOs requires an emphasis on decentralized power, autonomy, values that share a common goal, vision and are (being) strived for, and shared treasuries controlled by decentralized mechanisms.
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