Lead-in: Whether you participate in DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), manage remote teams with digital tools, or are simply curious about "what's left for humans in the AI era," these three papers will offer you a fresh perspective.
Each answers a key question: When organizations no longer rely on traditional hierarchies, what drives people to work, and what drains them?
Paper 1: Token-Centric Work Practices in Fluid Organizations
When Organizations Become "Fluid," Tokens Become the New Management Tool
Schirrmacher, N. B., Jensen, J. R., & Avital, M. (2021)
Core Question
Traditional enterprises have org charts, management layers, and policies. But what if an organization has no fixed structure, no employment relationships, and not even an office — relying entirely on strangers collaborating via smart contracts on a blockchain?
This is the reality of "fluid organizations" — a new, radically flexible organizational form. Two of the most representative examples are Yearn Finance and MakerDAO.
What They Found
The researchers found that in such organizations, tokens serve multiple functions that in traditional organizations would be handled by management, HR, finance, and even corporate culture combined:
- Coordination Tool: Tokens are not money — they are signals. A token holder's voting weight determines project direction, aligning decisions across people dispersed worldwide
- Incentive Engine: Token value is tied to overall organizational success — every contribution makes everyone's tokens more valuable, creating a scaled-up version of "everyone is a shareholder"
- Governance Gateway: Token holders can vote on fund allocation, protocol parameters, and even who gets hired
- Identity Marker: In an environment with no face-to-face meetings or badges, the number of tokens you hold is your "presence" in the organization
Why It Matters
This paper was published in 2021. Back then, most people considered DAOs a niche crypto enthusiast toy. But five years later, the logic of "tokenized collaboration" is seeping into traditional enterprises at scale:
- Remote teams use "reputation points" to manage contributions
- Open-source projects use "contribution tokens" to distribute revenue
- Creator communities use NFTs as identity and权益 tokens
In a word: Tokens are not digital currency — they are a new kind of organizational management tool. Understanding them is understanding the foundational architecture of future work.
Paper 2: Tedious Work
Digital Technology Makes Your Work More "Tedious" — And That's the Most Dangerous Part
Bruns, H. C., & Long Lingo, E. (2024)
Administrative Science Quarterly, 69(1), 39-79
Core Question
Digital technology dramatically reduces the iteration cost and modification convenience of creative work. This sounds like all good news. But Bruns and Long Lingo ask a counterintuitive question: When "doing it over" becomes too easy, can we get trapped in the iteration itself?
What They Found
The researchers conducted comparative ethnographic studies in two very different fields — systems biology labs and music production studios. They identified a widely overlooked problem: "tedious work."
Definition: Repetitive, detail-oriented work that requires domain expertise but lacks creativity.
They identified four types:
- "Fishing": Searching through vast amounts of data for that one potentially meaningful clue — not exploring, but "fishing"
- "Administrating": Managing versions, labeling files, organizing metadata — 20% creating, 80% organizing
- "Polishing": Fine-tuning a parameter, adjusting a track's volume, tweaking a page margin — not changing essence but pursuing perfection
- "Compiling": Piecing together outputs from different sources and making sure they work together — the tedium of integration
The Three "Silent Killers" of Tedious Work
Digital technology enables infinite iteration at every step, but it also creates three traps:
- Time Sink: You spend 80% of your time on repeated modifications
- Motivation Drain: Repetitive operations exhaust your intrinsic drive
- Information Overload: Too many versions, you can't remember which is the final one
Why It Matters
This paper is profoundly significant for "AI-era creators."
Its key lesson: AI should not only help you "create faster" but should also help you reduce "tedious work."
If you use AI to assist with creation (writing, coding, design, research), an important question to ask is: Is AI reducing your tedious work, or is it just helping you generate more tedious work faster?
A good assistant should let you focus on "fishing" and "exploration," not help you "polish" and "compile" things that may have no meaning at 10x speed.
In a word: The freedom to iterate comes at a cost. Digital technology opens the door to infinite revisions, but only those who know when to stop and channel their energy into what truly matters can produce genuinely impactful outcomes.
Paper 3: Beyond Money
No Cash, Just "Shares": The Incentive Experiment in DAO Communities
Chen, K., Fan, Y., Fang, Y., & Luo, X. (2025)
Journal of Operations Management, 71(7), 988-1016
Core Question
If you run a community (whether a DAO, open-source project, or creator community), do you want members to create more content or maintain more order? How much incentive is enough? What happens if you give "shares" (token ownership) instead of "cash"?
How They Studied It
The researchers analyzed real behavioral data from 98,000 users on Steemit (a blockchain-based social media platform) from 2017 to 2019.
Steemit's unique feature: it has two types of tokens:
- Steem (tradeable token) — convertible to cash, equivalent to "salary"
- Steem Power (governance token) — not directly redeemable, but carries more voting power, similar to "equity"
The "Power-up" operation — where users choose to convert Steem into Steem Power (swapping cash for equity) — served as a natural experiment for the researchers to observe the effects of "ownership incentives."
What They Found
1. Ownership (equity) vs. Cash (salary) have very different effects
| Dimension | Cash (tradeable token) driven | Equity (governance token) driven |
|---|---|---|
| Content creation volume | Moderate ↑ | Significant ↑ ↑ |
| Maintenance behavior (likes, comments) | Moderate ↑ | Strong ↑ ↑ ↑ |
| Content novelty | Normal | ↓ Decreased |
2. Interesting counterintuitive findings
- Equity incentives make you more willing to "maintain the community" rather than "create new content": Users with ownership were more inclined to like and comment on others' content (curation) rather than posting their own
- Equity incentives reduce content novelty: Users tended to write "safe, popular" content rather than take creative risks
- The effect of equity incentives diminishes over time: Once the novelty wears off, so does the effect
- But if you let users reconfirm their choice (e.g., "power-up" again), the effect recovers
- Users with weak social ties are more easily motivated by equity incentives: Newcomers need a greater sense of "ownership"
- High-reputation users are less responsive to equity incentives: They are already creating for other reasons
Why It Matters
This has direct implications for any "incentive-driven platform business":
- Free Diagnosis → Paid Service: What Is Your "Equity"? In our business, free diagnosis is a "tradeable token" (usable immediately but expires quickly), while subscriptions or 1-on-1 consultations are the "governance token" (long-term relationship, growing equity). The former drives short-term usage, the latter drives deep engagement.
- Warning on Novelty Decline: If users receive too much "equity-style" return, they may become conservative. This is especially important in educational contexts — if students' motivation is overdriven by "point rankings," exploratory learning may be suppressed.
- Re-affirmation Effect: Periodically letting users "confirm" their choice (e.g., renewing, re-subscribing) can reactivate the incentive effect.
In a word: Equity incentives make people more loyal but more conservative; cash incentives make people freer but more detached. When designing incentives, consider not "what others would choose," but "what kind of contributor do you want your participants to become."
Putting the Three Papers Together: The Bigger Picture
| Dimension | Paper 1 (Fluid Orgs) | Paper 2 (Tedious Work) | Paper 3 (Token Incentives) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core concern | How to coordinate without structure | How digital tools drain creativity | How incentive design shapes behavior |
| Shared theme | Digital technology is redefining "work" itself | ||
| AI-era implications | Tokens = basic mgmt tool | AI = tedious work vacuum | Incentives = behavior shaper |
The shared insight across these three papers is: Technology is reshaping the fundamental logic of "organizations" and "work" to an extent beyond our expectations.
- The traditional "get paid → do work" model is being supplemented — and even replaced — by "tokenized collaboration"
- Digital tools give people creative freedom on one hand, while silently consuming creators' energy and time on the other
- Incentive design is no longer just an economic issue — it is a behavioral psychology issue
For those of us building a human-AI collaborative business model, these academic insights are not shelf decorations — they are the skeleton of product design.
References
- Token-centric work practices in fluid organizations: The cases of Yearn and MakerDAO — Schirrmacher, N. B., Jensen, J. R., & Avital, M., 2021
- Tedious work: Developing novel outcomes with digitization in the arts and sciences — Bruns, H. C., & Long Lingo, E., Administrative Science Quarterly, 69(1), 39-79, 2024
- Beyond money: Incentive effects of tokenized ownership on user contribution in DAOs — Chen, K., Fan, Y., Fang, Y., & Luo, X., Journal of Operations Management, 71(7), 988-1016, 2025