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My Top 4 Articles for 2013

Given that the year 2014 is coming to an end, I asked myself the other day which recent papers have influenced my thinking and writing this year. First on the list is the MISQ special issue by Bharadwaj et al. (2013). In the paper, the authors attempt to bring together the strategy and information systems literature and emphasize the strategic role of information technology in organizations. Next, there’s the ISR special issue by Aral et al. (2013) on social media and business transformation, which sheds light on the transformative power of social media technologies as a specific class of information technologies. Third on the list is Treem & Leonardi’s (2013) book chapter on social media affordances, explaining how social media technologies differ from previous forms of computer-mediated communication and what kind of actions they facilitate. Ultimately, there’s Wang et al.’s (2013) OS paper, which highlights the competitive nature of online groups as they compete for members’ attention and time. Continue reading My Top 4 Articles for 2013

Conference Paper on Social Capital

The concept of social capital is something I’ve been interested in ever since the beginning of my PhD (here’s a blog post from 2010, for example). This summer, I presented a conceptual paper on the development of social capital in online communities at the 20th Americas Conference on Information Systems in Savannah, GA. You’ll find the abstract, the conference presentation, and the link to the final article below.

“The present paper extends social capital theory by exploring the creation of social capital in a highly innovative, yet under-researched organizational form: online communities. It is shown that social capital development has thus far not been sufficiently theorized and research on how social capital may be created in online communities is missing altogether. Attempting to fill this gap, I draw on earlier contributions to the sociological literature by Coleman and Bourdieu. More specifically, four mechanisms that lead to the creation of social capital are identified, namely closure, stability, interdependence, and interaction. The concept of fluidity is then introduced as an important characteristic of online communities. The impact of fluidity on the mechanisms for social capital development is consequently scrutinized and some propositions are developed. The paper concludes with a discussion of opportunities for overcoming the challenges identified earlier. Implications for research and practice are advanced.” Continue reading Conference Paper on Social Capital

New article: Impact of information technology on knowledge creation

In the fall of 2012, I wrote about my experiences at the knowledgecamp, a barcamp for all those interested in knowledge management. The barcamp participants had a strong interest in the use of social media for knowledge management and several sessions were dedicated to the topic. In one of them, I presented some ideas of an ongoing research project.  It was about the impact of social media on knowledge creation. This project has now come to an end. Me and my co-authors, Gabriele Vollmar and Heinz-Theo Wagner, managed to get the results published in a special issue on social media in the Journal of Enterprise Information Management. Here is a short summary:  Continue reading New article: Impact of information technology on knowledge creation

Conference Paper: Leadership 2.0

My colleague Alexander Richter and I recently presented an article on ‘Leadership 2.0’ at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). The article deals with the impact of social media and online communities on leaders in organizations. We present a framework to support and engage leaders in the transition process towards a networked organization. You can find the abstract, our conference presentation, and the full citation below.

“The adoption of social software brings about a plethora of socio-technological changes for organizations. A still largely unresolved challenge is to develop a better understanding of the consequences for leadership. To address this challenge, we first develop the notion of leadership 2.0, delineating it from previous leadership approaches. Then, we present results from 24 interviews conducted with project leaders for social software projects of publicly listed, mostly multinational organizations. Analyzing the interviews, we derive a set of activities that help to consider the role of leaders during the adoption and use of social software. We group the activities into three categories: convince (engage and activate leaders), sensitize (demonstrate the impact and develop new leadership models) and coach (help leaders to embrace the new tools and understand emergent use cases). We present this set of interventions as a framework to support and engage leaders in the transition process towards a networked organization.”

Reference:

Richter, A., & Wagner, D. 2014. Leadership 2.0: Engaging and Supporting Leaders in the Transition towards a Networked Organization. Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences: 574–583, Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society. [Link]

Social Media for Research

I’ve been using social media for professional purposes for a number of years now. During this time, I’ve had several conversations with colleagues over lunch and on other occasions about why I do what I do and what I get out of it. To date, I’ve not written these thoughts up (although some conversations have been converted into blog posts on this site). Recently, I’ve come across a presentation by Ian McCarthy, who’s a Professor at Simon Fraser University, which does exactly that. In his presentation, Ian reflects on how he uses social media for academic purposes. Interestingly, he does so with help of an article he’s recently published in the journal Business Horizons. Now, that’s applied research 😉 You can find his presentation embedded below. For my German readers, here’s a related presentation by my colleague Alexander Stocker entitled ‘Why research institutions should be using social media’.