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As telecommunication networks become more common, there is an increasing interest in the factors underlying the development of online social structures. It has been proposed that these structures are new forms of organizing which are not subject to the same constraints as traditional social structures. However, from anecdotal evidence and case studies it is difficult to evaluate whether online social structures are subject to the same problems as traditional social structures. Drawing from prior studies of traditional social structures and empirical analyses of longitudinal data from a sample of Internet-based groups, this exploratory work considers the role of size and communication activity in sustainable online social structures. A resource-based theory of sustainable social structures is presented. Members contribute time, energy, and other resources, enabling a social structure to provide benefits for individuals. These benefits, which include information, influence, and social support, are the basis for a social structure's ability to attract and retain members. This model focuses on the system of opposing forces that link membership size as a component of resource availability and communication activity as an aspect of benefit provision to the sustainability of an online social structure. Analyses of data from a random sample of e-mail-based Internet social structures (listservs) indicate that communication activity and size have both positive and negative effects on a structure's sustainability. These results suggest that while the use of networked communication technologies may alter the form of communication, balancing the opposing impacts of membership size and communication activity in order to maintain resource availability and provide benefits for current members remains a fundamental problem underlying the development of sustainable online social structures.

Online discussion communities have become a widely used medium for interaction, enabling conversations across a broad range of topics and contexts. Their success, however, depends on participants' willingness to invest their time and attention in the absence of formal role and control structures. Some studies of online communities argue that individuals are driven by self-interest, while others emphasize more altruistic motivations. To get beyond these inconsistent explanations, the authors offer a model that brings dissimilar rationales into a single conceptual framework and shows the validity of each rationale in explaining different online behaviors. Drawing on typologies of organizational commitment, they argue that members may have psychological bonds to a particular online community based on need, affect, and/or obligation. They develop hypotheses that explain how each form of commitment to a community affects the likelihood that a member will engage in particular behaviors. Results indicate that each form of community commitment has a unique impact on each behavior.

Increasingly, online discussion communities are used to support activities ranging from software development to political campaigns. An important feature of an online discussion community is its content boundaries, which are individual perceptions of what materials and discussions are part of the community and what are not, and how that community is related to others within a larger system. Yet in spite of its importance, many community infrastructures allow individual participants to reshape content boundaries by simultaneously associating their contributions with multiple online discussion communities. This reshaping behavior is a controversial aspect of the creation and management of many types of online discussion communities. On one hand, many communities explicitly discourage boundary reshaping behaviors in their frequently asked questions or terms-of-use document. On the other hand, community infrastructures continue to allow such reshaping behaviors. To explain this controversy, we theorize how the extent of boundary reshaping in an online discussion community has simultaneously positive and negative effects on its member dynamics and responsiveness. We test predictions about the conflicting effects of reshaping behaviors with 60 months of longitudinal data from 140 USENET newsgroups, focusing on cross-posting activities as a form of reshaping behavior. Empirical results are consistent with the proposed hypotheses that reshaping behaviors within a discussion community affect member dynamics and community responsiveness in both positive and negative ways. Taken together, the findings highlight the boundary-related design challenges faced by managers seeking to support ongoing activity within online discussion communities.

The dominant narrative of the Internet has been one of unconstrained growth, abundance, and plenitude. It is in this context that new forms of organizing, such as online groups, have emerged. However, the same factors that underlie the utopian narrative of Internet life also give rise to numerous online groups, many of which fail to attract participants or to provide significant value. This suggests that despite the potential transformative nature of modern information technology, issues of scarcity, competition, and context may remain critical to the performance and functioning of online groups. In this paper, we draw from organizational ecology theories to develop an ecological view of online groups to explain how overlapping membership among online groups causes intergroup competition for member attention and affects a group's ability to grow. Hypotheses regarding the effects of group size, age, and membership overlap on growth are proposed and tested with data from a 64-month, longitudinal sample of 240 online discussion groups. The analysis shows that sharing members with other groups reduced future growth rates, suggesting that membership overlap puts competitive pressure on online groups. Our results also suggest that, compared with smaller and younger groups, larger and older groups experience greater difficulty in growing their membership. In addition, larger groups were more vulnerable to competitive pressure than smaller groups: larger groups experienced greater difficulty in growing their membership than smaller groups as competition intensified. Overall, our findings show how an abundance of opportunities afforded by technologies can create scarcity in user time and effort, which increases competitive pressure on online groups. Our ecological view extends organizational ecology theory to new organizational forms online and highlights the importance of studying the competitive environment of online groups.

Online discussion communities play an important role in the development of relationships and the transfer of knowledge within and across organizations. Their underlying technologies enhance these processes by providing infrastructures through which group-based communication can occur. Community administrators often make decisions about technologies with the goal of enhancing the user experience, but the impact of such decisions on how a community develops must also be considered. To shed light on this complex and under-researched phenomenon, we offer a model of key latent constructs influenced by technology choices and possible causal paths by which they have dynamic effects on communities. Two important community characteristics that can be impacted are community size (number of members) and community resilience (membership that is willing to remain involved with the community in spite of variability and change in the topics discussed). To model community development, we build on attraction–selection–attrition (ASA) theory, introducing two new concepts: participation costs (how much time and effort are required to engage with content provided in a community) and topic consistency cues (how strongly a community signals that topics that may appear in the future will be consistent with what it has hosted in the past). We use the proposed ASA theory of online communities (OCASA) to develop a simulation model of community size and resilience that affirms some conventional wisdom and also has novel and counterintuitive implications. Analysis of the model leads to testable new propositions about the causal paths by which technology choices affect the emergence of community size and community resilience, and associated implications for community sustainability.

In a world where information technology is both important and imperfect, organizations and individuals are faced with the ongoing challenge of determining how to use complex, fragile systems in dynamic contexts to achieve reliable outcomes. While reliability is a central concern of information systems practitioners at many levels, there has been limited consideration in information systems scholarship of how firms and individuals create, manage, and use technology to attain reliability. We propose that examining how individuals and organizations use information systems to reliably perform work will increase both the richness and relevance of IS research. Drawing from studies of individual and organizational cognition, we examine the concept of mindfulness as a theoretical foundation for explaining efforts to achieve individual and organizational reliability in the face of complex technologies and surprising environments. We then consider a variety of implications of mindfulness theories of reliability in the form of alternative interpretations of existing knowledge and new directions for inquiry in the areas of IS operations, design, and management.

Firms need to balance efficiency gains obtained through exploiting existing knowledge assets with long-term competitive viability achieved through exploring new knowledge resources. Because the use of knowledge management systems (KMSs) continues to expand, understanding how these systems affect exploration and exploitation practices at the individual level is important to advance both knowledge management theory and practice. This study reports the results of a multi-industry survey investigating how psychological climate and KMS access influence solution reuse (exploitation) and solution innovation (exploration) in the context of technical support work. Our results show that KMS access does not directly determine solution innovation or solution reuse. Instead, KMS access strengthens the positive relationship between a climate for innovation and solution innovation and reverses the positive relationship between a climate for autonomy and solution innovation. The implications for knowledge management research and practice are discussed. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

In software development, team-based work structures are commonly used to accomplish complex projects. Software project teams must be able to utilize the expertise and knowledge of participants without overwhelming individual members. To efficiently leverage individuals' knowledge and expertise, software project teams develop team cognition structures that facilitate their knowledge activities. This study focuses on the emergence and evolution of team cognition in software project teams, and examines how communication activity and team diversity impact the formation of these structures. A longitudinal study was conducted of 51 database development teams. The results suggest that some forms of communication and team diversity affect the formation of team cognition. Frequency of meetings and phone calls were positively related to the formation of team cognition, while e-mail use had no effect. Gender diversity had a strong and positive effect on the development of team cognition and the effect remained stable over time. Implications for the practical potential and limitations of purposive team construction as a strategy for improving software development team performance are discussed.

In 1888, Mark Twain reflected on the writer's special feel for words to his correspondent, George Bainton, noting that \"the difference between the almost-right word and the right word is really a large matter.\" We recognize differences between a politician who is \"willful\" and one who is \"willing\" even though the difference does not cross word-stems or parts of speech. We recognize that being \"held up\" evokes different experiences depending upon whether its direct object is a meeting, a bank, or an example. Although we can notice hundreds of examples in the language where small differences in wording produce large reader effects, the authors of The Power of Words argue that these examples are random glimpses of a hidden systematic knowledge that governs how we, as writers or speakers, learn to shape experience for other human beings. Over the past several years, David Kaufer and his colleagues have developed a software program for analyzing writing called DocuScope. This book illustrates the concepts and rhetorical theory behind the software analysis, examining patterns in writing and showing writers how their writing works in different categories to accomplish varying objectives. Reflecting the range and variety of audience experience that contiguous words of surface English can prime, the authors present a theory of language as an instrument of rhetorically priming audiences and a catalog of English strings to implement the theory. The project creates a comprehensive map of the speaker and writer's implicit knowledge about predisposing audience experience at the point of utterance. The book begins with an explanation of why studying language from the standpoint of priming--not just meaning--is vital to non-question begging theories of close reading and to language education in general. The remaining chapters in Part I detail the steps taken to prepare a catalog study of English strings for their properties as priming instruments. Part II describes in detail the catalog of priming categories, including enough examples to help readers see how individual words and strings of English fit into the catalog. The final part describes how the authors have applied the catalog of English strings as priming tools to conduct textual research. Contents: T. Oakley, Foreword. Preface. Introduction: Words and Their Potency for Priming Audiences. Part I: Preliminaries. Priming Audience and Practices of Literacy. Cataloging English Strings for Their Priming Potencies: A Report of a Research Study. Methods for Selecting and Catloging Strings. The Catalog Hierarchy. The Hierarchy in Relation to Previous Scholarship. Part II: Results: The Catalog in Depth. Cluster 1: Internal Perspectives. Cluster 2: Relational Perspectives, Part I. Cluster 2: Relational Perspectives, Part II. Cluster 3: External Perspectives. Part III: Implications and Applications of Rhetorical Priming Theory. Using Priming Strings to Analyze Corpora of Texts.

The impact of a discipline's research is constrained by its ability to articulate compelling problems. Well-crafted problems are the foundation for mobilizing the effort, resources, and attention essential to scientific progress and broader impact. We argue that Information Systems (IS) scholars, individually and collectively, must develop the practice of articulating and engaging large-scale, broad scope problems – or grand challenges. To support this position, we examine the role and value of grand challenge efforts in science and engineering based on a theory of grand challenges as socially constructed boundary objects. Conceptualizing grand challenges in these terms implies strategies and approaches for magnifying the impact of IS research by engaging these types of problems.