Special Section Introduction—Online Community as Space for Knowledge Flows

Samer Faraj (), Georg von Krogh (), Eric Monteiro () and Karim R. Lakhani ()
Additional contact information
Samer Faraj: Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montréal, Québec H3A 1G5, Canada
Georg von Krogh: ETH Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland
Eric Monteiro: Department of Computer and Information Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7491 Trondheim, Norway
Karim R. Lakhani: Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts 02163

Information Systems Research, 2016, vol. 27, issue 4, 668-684

Abstract: Online communities frequently create significant economic and relational value for community participants and beyond. It is widely accepted that the underlying source of such value is the collective flow of knowledge among community participants. We distinguish the conditions for flows of tacit and explicit knowledge in online communities and advance an unconventional theoretical conjecture: Online communities give rise to tacit knowledge flows between participants. The crucial condition for these flows is not the advent of novel, digital technology as often portrayed in the literature, but instead the technology’s domestication by humanity and the sociality it affords. This conjecture holds profound implications for theory and research in the study of management and organization, as well as their relation to information technology.

Keywords: online community; community of practice; epistemic community; value creation; knowledge-based view; knowledge creation; innovation; tacit knowledge; organization theory; organizational knowledge creation theory; organization form; knowledge sharing; digital technology; digital platform; open source software (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/isre.2016.0682 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orisre:v:27:y:2016:i:4:p:668-684

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Information Systems Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().