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Corporate philanthropy is increasingly a vital decision-making basis for consumers to purchase and establish relationships with enterprises. However, few studies have examined corporate philanthropy from the perspective of community evolution. To address this gap, this study aims to provide a more in-depth and holistic investigation of corporate philanthropy by examining the evolution of social media brand communities caused by corporate philanthropy and the characteristics of consumer interactive behavior.

Web crawlers developed by Python were employed to collect data of ERKE from Sina Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter). A total of 2,736 posts and 7,774 comments were collected and investigated using social network and sentiment tendency analyses.

The results showed that the evolution of the social media brand community presented a prominent three-stage characteristic influenced by corporate philanthropy. The findings not only support the benefits of corporate philanthropy but also show the possible disadvantages. Besides, this study further concluded the characteristics of consumer interactive behavior in the social media brand community.

This paper addresses an attractive and practical issue related to the impact of corporate philanthropy. Moreover, this study is one of the first studies to examine the impact of corporate philanthropy in the context of the social media brand community. The findings of this study will provide a valuable reference for community operations and practitioners of brands.

The purpose of this paper is to put forward a model to map the evolution of a business Community of Practice (CoP) in terms of learning and knowledge management processes.

Empirical evidence is based on seven case studies and the analyses of three best practices from secondary sources. Two of those cases are analyzed longitudinally from inception, while the others are retrospective. Cases were chosen in order to cover different kinds of industries and, especially, to analyze sharing of different kinds of knowledge (from call‐centre operators to complex new products knowledge).

The article sheds light on the different evolutionary paths that business CoPs follow and the role of the dynamics of the organizational commitment and the people involvement. It was noticed that a high level of commitment from both the organization and its members is related to the effectiveness of the Community in supporting learning and knowledge management processes.

The case studies and best practice examples reported are all based on the experiences of Western companies – although some, if not all, may have global operations. It is possible that some of the conclusions (e.g, levels of organizational commitment and individual participation, evolutionary stages and drivers), may not be valid for Asian‐headquartered companies.

This article aims to develop actionable knowledge to support management in understanding how to manage a business CoP, in order to create value for both the organization and its members. The proposed model can be used for mapping the CoP evolution, while identifying the appropriate governance tools to cultivate, stimulate and drive the Community evolution.

In the model, the evolution of a Community has been assessed in terms of its vitality – i.e. its effectiveness in supporting knowledge management and learning. This vitality depends on the combination of the organization's commitment and members' involvement. Therefore, supporting a Community in its evolution means stimulating and maintaining the commitment (animation and promotions levers) of these two parties.

This study aims to explore the interplay between community dynamics and knowledge production using the quantum computing research field as a case study. Quantum computing holds the promise of dramatically increasing computation speed and solving problems that are currently unsolvable in a short space of time. In this highly dynamic area of innovation, computer companies, research laboratories and governments are racing to develop the field.

After constructing temporal co-authorship networks, the authors identify seven different events affecting communities of researchers, which they label: forming, growing, splitting, shrinking, continuing, merging, dissolving. The authors then extract keywords from the titles and abstracts of their contributions to characterize the dynamics of knowledge production and examine the relationship between community events and knowledge production over time.

The findings show that forming and splitting are associated with retaining in memory what is currently known, merging and growing with the creation of new knowledge and splitting, shrinking and dissolving with the curation of knowledge.

Although the link between communities and knowledge has long been established, much less is known about the relationship between the dynamics of communities and their link with collective cognitive processes. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the present contribution is one of the first to shed light on this dynamic aspect of community knowledge production.

The evolution of the service marketing field was marked by the emergence of a global, vigorous and tolerant community of service marketing researchers. This paper seeks to examine the history of the service marketing community and argues that it may be an archetype for building the emergent global service research community.

The study combines qualitative and quantitative approaches. The authors interviewed four pioneering service scholars and also collected descriptive data (e.g. Authorship, Affiliation, Title, Keywords) of all service related articles published in 13 top peer‐reviewed marketing and service journals over the last 30 years (5,432 articles; 6,450 authors). In a dynamic analysis the authors mapped global collaboration between countries over time and detected clusters of international collaboration.

Findings suggest a growing international collaboration for the USA and the UK, while for other countries like Israel the global collaboration started from a high level and decreases now. Further, the service marketing community never became polarized and there were always contributions from researchers all over the world.

As the global service research community is developing, service marketing becomes a research neighborhood within the broader service research community. Simultaneously, other research neighborhoods are emerging within this new community (e.g. service arts, service management, service engineering, service science).

Anchored on the social evolution and biological evolution metaphors, this study explains the evolution of the service marketing field from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Furthermore, it explains the development of the service marketing community as an archetype for building the global service research community.

The purpose of this paper is to add a needed sport foundation for the brand community conversation evolution within the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship (Popp et al., 2016; Richelieu, 2008; Trail et al., 2016) from the spark of Gladden and Funk’s (2001) brand association and loyalty in sport.

This paper traces the evolution of brand community research from its beginnings in the general business literature to the current brand community research in sport marketing today. Muniz and O’Guinn (2001) define brand communities as a specialized and non-geographically bound community based around a set of structured social relationships amongst admirers of a brand and are often recognized as the most integral relationship component of consumers to brands (Muge and Ozge, 2013).

Media transcends geography and brand communities will continue to transcend geography to the boundaries of mass media.

With this growing importance on attachment to brand community (ABC) through mass media, or attachment team in the sport context, further exploration on attachment variables is critical for the success of the next evolutionary stage of brand communities.

An ABC framework in the sport setting is proposed through multidisciplinary variables gathered in a review of brand community literature to address the unique attachment perspectives of sport consumers.

Although a growing body of literature that we will discuss later in the paper gives evidence of changing perspectives on entrepreneurship – perspectives that reveal increasing emphasis on the collectivity – two troubling themes persist: (1) the “myth of the lonely only entrepreneur,” and (2) the supply versus demand perspectives on mass entrepreneurial activity. In the sections that follow, we briefly describe these perspectives and argue that they have long since overstayed their welcome.

This paper aims to investigate the rise of a Chinese fashion cluster in Lombardy.

Three approaches and descending levels of analysis are integrated: a quantitative analysis based on demographic data to highlight the evolution of the regional distribution of the Chinese community and Chinese entrepreneurship in Lombardy; a literature review to reconstruct the historical development of Chinatown in Milan; and few in-depth interviews and a survey to represent how the Chinese living in Chinatown perceive the changing role of the enclave.

The Chinese in Lombardy are rising as a regional ethnic fashion cluster. This cluster is rising out of three major drivers: ethnic social capital as a source of community-based entrepreneurship; the crisis of traditional industrial districts in the 1990s as a trigger opportunity; and the trans-regionalization of the fashion industry as a main driver of its current development. The rise of this cluster is bottom-up.

The findings are based on a single case study. There are evidences showing that the Chinese are rising as regional and/or inter-regional clusters in other institutional settings. However, this study may benefit from comparisons with other institutional and national contexts.

Chinese entrepreneurship may foster regional growth as a complementary source of cultural variety, internationalization and multi-regional co-specialization.

Entrepreneurship may foster social cohesion and collaboration.

This paper contributes to existing literature by proposing a would-be theory of the evolution of regional ethnic clusters.

Entrepreneurship involves complex interactions between individuals and environments but there is little research on these dynamics. We address this gap by conducting an inductive qualitative study of entrepreneurs in the exclusive tourist destination of Tiradentes, Brazil. Tiradentes has a unique architectural, cultural, and economic heritage that serves as a unique sociocultural backdrop that influences entrepreneurs’ models of start-up thinking and action. Specifically, our investigation revealed that entrepreneurs’ backgrounds (native vs. nonnative) and social identities come together with the sociocultural fabric of the community in a way that moved them towards a “Joia” or “Bijuteria” orientation, each of which were associated with a distinct mindset. This diversity had implications for entrepreneurs’ conceptualizations of start-up models possible within the backdrop of Tiradentes sociocultural fabric and this influenced the actions entrepreneurs took such as the geographic location chosen for the business and the business practices used. We discovered that entrepreneurs favoring one orientation over another tended to occupy predictable physical and social positions in the community while also espousing similar values and perspectives. These results are used to elaborate the theory on the link between the external and internal explanation for entrepreneurial thinking and action. The net effect is new understanding regarding ways models of start-up thinking and action can be investigated.

Dispersed multinational teams include people from multiple nations, some of whom are not collocated. In a knowledge economy, such teams must locate, store, allocate, and retrieve knowledge. Three central questions are: (a) How can dispersed multinational teams manage knowledge resource flows? (b) What factors influence knowledge resource distribution in these teams? and (c) How do dispersed multinational teams evolve over time? This chapter examines knowledge resource sharing in multinational teams through three theoretical lenses: transactive memory theory, collective action theory, and evolutionary theory, and concludes with practical suggestions for managing dispersed multinational teams that are derived from these three theoretical lenses.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the impact of unsustainable community platforms from community and information sharing perspectives using Google Lively as an example. The aim is to analyse what happens when a community platform is not sustainable and explore the reasons why Lively failed or succeeded as an arena of participation and information sharing.

The study is based on an ethnographically informed analysis of texts on Google Lively mined from the web and gathered using two small qualitative surveys.

The findings show that Lively fostered the emergence of several virtual communities that outlived the platform. Shared experience, experience of crisis and a distinct identity appeared to be significant factors that seemed to contribute to the success of analysed Livelian communities.

The study is based on a convenience sample and an analysis of one virtual community platform.

The results inform the development of community strategies for situations when a platform is closing and plans are being made for the sustained existence of the virtual community in new contexts.

This is the first comprehensive study on Google Lively. The findings can be expected to have relevance also in the context of comparable virtual community platforms.