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IT Artifacts and Online Communities: The Role of Technology as Institutional Carriers
Get PDFThe pervasiveness of the Internet and social media has fostered the spread of online communities, collectives which have been interchangeably called virtual communities in the scholarly literature. In spite of the diffusion of Internet-mediated collectives, research on the domain has not yet paid enough attention to how institutional environments influence virtual interactions in general and online governance structures in particular. Contributing to reduce this gap, this research investigates how institutions influence the governance structures of a group of online communities, particularly focusing on the role of IT artifacts as carriers of institutional features to virtual environments. This study argues that taking into account institutional contexts is important to understand how online communities are created and evolve; and that research on online collectives should take into consideration the kind of tools that intermediate communication in order to have a better understanding of their governance structures
THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES: HOW INSTITUTIONAL CARRIERS INFLUENCE ONLINE GOVERNANCE STRUCTURES
Get PDFThis research investigates how institutional carriers – from rules and power systems to cognitive schemas and information technology – influence the reproduction of centralized decision-making governance structures in virtual communities. Studying a group of four virtual communities, the findings show that community members invoke a variety of institutional carriers in order to try to legitimate actual centralized governance structures, which contradict their stated intentions of building decentralized decision making. The research illustrates in the micro-level how an institutionalized social structure is seen as meaningful by social actors in spite of being the opposite of what community members would rhetorically defend. The study explores how institutional carriers become sanction and legitimating mechanisms, which influence the reproduction of institutionalized behavior in virtual interactions, concluding on the relevance of understanding the institutional context to make sense of behavior patterns, which emerge from interactions in online environments in general and virtual communities in particular
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Virtual Communities and Democratic Debates: A Case Study on Institutional Influences
Get PDFAn empirical investigation on virtual communities shows how conflictive institutions influence the way members perceive their online interactions as being supportive or not of a more democratic debate. On the one hand community members identify their discussion lists as a space for free speech, emphasizing the relevance of having more access to information and channels for influencing society on issues related to environmental education. On the other hand they recognize obstacles for the free debate of ideas in these collectives, mainly to avoid conflicts with community leaders and members who are linked with powerful institutions. The research points out the relevance of considering the institutional environment to understand the nature of interactions in virtual communities in general, and their potential and limits as spaces for democratic debate in particular. Lessons from these informal online groups inform research on other virtual spaces, highlighting how the institutional environment influences these collectives
An institutional analysis of governance structures: How institutional carriers influence decision making in Brazilian environmental-education internet-mediated communities.
No full textThis thesis presents an investigation on the institutionalisation of four Brazilian Internet-mediated communities that provide debate and organize political mobilization related to the education on environmental issues. Drawing on new institutionalism, this research claims that institutional factors influence how these collectivities structure their governance and decision-making processes. More specifically, this study adopts W. Richard Scott's (2001) framework on institutional carriers to analyse the phenomenon of the diffusion of a segregated decision-making process, which Simon (1997 [1945]) claims is an instance of centralization present in hierarchical organizations, in communities that declare to be attempting to create network-like organizational structures. The comparative case study, based on qualitative methodology (in-depth, semi-structured interviews), reveals that laws, power and authority systems, cognitive schema, jobs, roles, scripts and Internet tools, among other institutional carriers, influence the communities in reproducing centralized governance structures. Furthermore, this research highlights how social actors interpret and reproduce such social structures in their environment. This research balances the role of both social structures and agency to understand how institutional forms diffuse through the studied virtual communities. Empirical evidence suggests social actors embed institutionalised social structures in their practices through adapting them to the situation, which includes the cultivation of mechanisms of legitimation and sanctions of patterned behaviour
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
An Institutional anaylysis of governance structures : How institutional carriers influence decision-making processes in Brazillian environmental-eduacation Internet-mediated communities
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