Understanding Organizational Responses to Innovative Deviance: A Case Study of HathiTrust.

Abstract

This thesis traces the emergence and evolution of HathiTrust as way of generating deeper insights into the processes of sociotechnical transformation. HathiTrust emerged from the groundbreaking and legally contentious Google mass digitization project as an organization operated by the University of Michigan. It grew into a partnership with over 100 research institutions that support a shared digital repository, oversee a digital library comprised of over thirteen million volumes, and run a research center for non-consumptive computational research. This dissertation combines traditional legal research and analysis with social scientific approaches. Primary data for this case study were generated from in-depth interviews and review of relevant documents such as contracts, judicial opinions, press releases, and organizational reports. It develops an analytic framework blending the sociological concept of innovative deviance with organizational sensemaking theories and copyright doctrine. It describes and explains how and why organizations make sense of and make decisions with respect to risk and opportunity under conditions of uncertainty, ambiguity, and disequilibrium. This explains how slow-moving institutions such as laws and academic research libraries change and adapt in accordance with changes in technology and social practices. It describes the dynamic, non-linear, and mutually constitutive relationships among technology, social practice, and law that shaped and were shaped by HathiTrust. In so doing, it offers insights into the processes of sociotechnical transformation.