earticle

영어

The production of Wikipedia entries, routine patrolling, community governance, and the management of special content areas have long relied on the unpaid contributions of volunteer editors. In the absence of explicit material rewards and clearly defined promotion timelines, how such highly stable and long-term labor is sustained remains insufficiently explained. By introducing the perspective of moral economy that is, a framework concerned with the normative justifications, moral expectations, and perceived legitimacy of labor arrangements this study examines how the legitimacy of waiting is institutionally constructed. Based on an analysis of platform policy texts, community discourses, and editors’ self-narratives, this article proposes an analytical framework of a patience-based moral economy. The findings demonstrate that mission-oriented narratives moralize editorial labor by substituting immediate returns with meanings such as the public good and free knowledge. Vague promotion pathways and non-convertible systems of symbolic reputation institutionalize “waiting,” rendering rewards both delayed and non-material. Furthermore, the binding of time investment to editorial roles moralizes withdrawal, framing exit as a retreat from public responsibility and thereby generating high moral costs. The conclusion suggests that editors’ “patience” should be understood not as an individual disposition, but as a behavioral condition jointly produced by platform institutions and community norms. This study extends the applicability of moral economy theory to research on non-market labor and platform governance, and offers a new explanatory pathway for understanding the stability of volunteer-based digital labor.