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Knowledge Collaboration in Online Communities
Open accessAbstract
Online communities (OCs) are a virtual organizational form in which knowledge collaboration can occur in unparalleled scale and scope, in ways not heretofore theorized. For example, collaboration can occur among people not known to each other, who share different interests and without dialogue. An exploration of this organizational form can fundamentally change how we theorize about knowledge collaboration among members of organizations. We argue that a fundamental characteristic of OCs that affords collaboration is their fluidity. This fluidity engenders a dynamic flow of resources in and out of the community—resources such as passion, time, identity, social disembodiment of ideas, socially ambiguous identities, and temporary convergence. With each resource comes both a negative and positive consequence, creating a tension that fluctuates with changes in the resource. We argue that the fluctuations in tensions can provide an opportunity for knowledge collaboration when the community responds to these tensions in ways that encourage interactions to be generative rather than constrained. After offering numerous examples of such generative responses, we suggest that this form of theorizing—induced by online communities—has implications for theorizing about the more general case of knowledge collaboration in organizations.
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“In online communities, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk or Upwork, platforms that attract very large numbers of contract workers or volunteer contributors from all over the world, algorithms are used to solve the organizational problem of recruitment, negotiating contracts, and motivating employees.”
From Working and organizing in the age of the learning algorithm (2018) · cites this paper as Faraj et al., 2011
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Metadata
- Authors
- Faraj, S., Jarvenpaa, S. L., & Majchrzak, A.
- Venue
- Organization Science
- Published
- 2011-10
- Volume
- 22
- Issue
- 5
- Pages
- 1224-1239
- ISSN
- 1047-7039 (ISSN-L)
- 1526-5455
- OpenAlex
- W2143952996
- Cited by
- 1,034
- References
- 15
- FWCI
- 150.71
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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