Knowledge Transfer in a Multiple Virtual Communities Network

Widely discussed in the mass media, Web 2.0, or social software, has also drawn the attention of researchers, developing into a whole new research area. With Web 2.0's further development, corporations aim to adopt its technologies and transfer its benefits, such as enhanced collaboration and knowledge sharing, to their organizations. Whether any of these benefits also apply in an organizational context and whether there are further, still uncovered, benefits remains unclear. Furthermore, research in this area is still in its early stages, thus hampering progress towards qualitative and quantitative models that could provide answers. In order to encourage further progress in this area, we reviewed the existing research on corporate blogging and identified 24 articles that investigate the topic. Using the framework by Ives et al. [18], we categorized the articles for further analysis. By means of process theory, we build a conceptual model and identify the antecedents and consequences of internal corporate weblog usage. Our findings suggest that usage is driven by organizational culture, as well as by attitudes towards blogging. In addition, the benefits of weblog usage are centered on community benefits.

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