Why People are Involved in and Committed to Online Knowledge-Sharing Communities

One challenge to the success of online knowledge-sharing communities relates to the participants' longtime participation. Literature has explored the determinants of initial participation rather than longtime participation despite significant differences between them. To fill this research gap, this article conceptualizes involvement and continuous commitment regarding longtime participation and examines their antecedents in the Chinese context. Extending the expectancy-value theory, knowledge-sharing expectancy, knowledge-sharing value, and knowledge-sharing affect are identified as antecedents of involvement and continuous commitment. This article further suggests that interpersonal trust and the norm of reciprocity are important contextual factors in the Chinese context that enhance the positive impacts of these antecedents on involvement and continuous commitment. Empirical results confirm most hypotheses. Interestingly, the impact of knowledge-sharing affect is not influenced by interpersonal trust or the norm of reciprocity. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Role of Instructors' Forum Interactions With Students in Promoting MOOC Continuance

This article describes how MOOCs, being a new global education and technology phenomenon, present both opportunities and challenges to educators and learners. The lack of face-to-face engagement introduces a sense of isolation in students, resulting in a high dropout rate. To this end, online forums are deemed to help overcome the problem by enabling interactions among the learners and facilitating their learning. Recent research further suggests that with an online forum provided in a MOOC, the presence of instructors may not be important. However, in this article, the authors provide two important insights: First, online forum indeed plays an important role in motivating learner continuance. Second, among the different types of forum activities, they find that interaction with instructors emerge as an important factor contributing to more assignment completions in addition to forum posting. The authors' post-hoc analysis also indicates that the importance of instructor presence may be particularly salient in the Eastern vis-à-vis Western culture, which points to future research opportunities.

Sellers versus buyers: differences in user information sharing on social commerce sites

Purpose

– Social commerce sites offer fertile ground for users to communicate product information. Given that such sites have the potential to transform the way of doing business, it is clearly important for academics to understand user information sharing on social commerce sites. Existing research has considered motivations as core elements of user information sharing in online communities. The purpose of this paper is to advance the theoretical understanding of user information sharing by investigating differences in motivations between the different user types of social commerce sites: sellers and buyers, and the impact on social commerce.

Design/methodology/approach

– The authors conducted an empirical study by analyzing data from a social commerce site in China, including panel data (n=892) and survey data (n=913).

Findings

– This research showed that user type (i.e. sellers and buyers) plays an important moderating role in user information sharing: sellers exert a positive moderating effect on utilitarian and social motivations, while buyers are found to have a positive moderating effect on hedonic motivation.

Research limitations/implications

– This study contributes to existing literature, not only by exploring the antecedents of user information sharing on social commerce sites from utilitarian, hedonic and social dimensions, but also by providing an evaluation of user types (i.e. sellers and buyers). The authors believe that the results of this study offer important and interesting insights for IS research and practice.

Practical implications

– This study will enhance social commerce site managers’ understanding of better features for information sharing and differences in motivation between sellers and buyers. This could improve the effectiveness of encouraging strategies and help social commerce sites be more sustainable in the highly competitive contemporary environment.

Originality/value

– Based on social exchange theory and motivation theory, this paper takes user types into account, and postulate that user type (i.e. sellers and buyers) plays a moderating role in the relationships between motivations (i.e. utilitarian, hedonic and social motivation) and user information sharing intention on social commerce sites.

Business Value of Enterprise Micro-blogging

The increasing use of micro-blogging as a marketing tool has increased research attention on usage and business value of enterprise micro-blogging. Based on research on information system (IS) usage and resource-based view (RBV) theory, this study develops a model to reveal the mechanism of business value creation of enterprise micro-blogging. The model consists of metrics on micro-blogging usage, micro-blogging operational performance, marketing capability, and firm performance. Questionnaires were distributed to firms that use micro-blogging. This study collects 241 valid responses for empirical analysis. The results suggest that the use of enterprise micro-blogging improves operational performance of enterprise micro-blogging directly and indirectly by increasing marketing capability, while operational performance of enterprise micro-blogging significantly affects firm performance. This study extends the stream of research that combines IS usage and RBV theory.