Search results

The rise of the sharing economy has brought with it a huge variety of new organizational forms and innovative business models. An integral part of these forms and models is the communities and members of sharing-economy organizations, since they significantly contribute to value creation for these organizations. Relying on community member contributions, though, is a challenge for these organizations because fluid community boundaries and voluntary membership makes it difficult to coordinate their activities. This chapter investigates the under-researched question of how sharing-economy organizations govern the actions of their community members. Following an abductive approach that included site visits, participant observations, and 67 interviews, we develop a framework that illustrates four different types of governance: pure market, pure clan, market-hierarchy hybrid, and clan-hierarchy hybrid. The framework explains differences among these types depending on the main activity (providing resources or producing jointly) and the primary aim of the community (business orientation or social orientation). This study thus contributes to research on both governance in general and to sharing-economy organizations in particular by capturing the variety and diversity of community forms, governance practices, and business-model configurations.

The chapter seeks to address a current gap in the literature: envisioning and justifying community outreach projects and turning such insights into best practices for managing such projects. Drawing heavily on informational interviews, the article highlights the importance of defining shared missions and strategic plans, identifying partners, researching needs and expectations, building trust and partnerships, setting and fulfilling communication expectations, offering tangible benefits to the partner, and evaluating outcomes. While focused on health sciences librarians and their community partners, these practices are broadly applicable to many library outreach programs and can enhance credibility, approaches, and impact, while increasing funding opportunities and users while creating sustainable collaborations.

The concept of a community form is drawn upon in many subfields of organizational theory. Although there is not much convergence on a level of analysis, there is convergence on a mode of action that is increasingly relevant to a knowledge-based economy marked by porous and shifting organizational boundaries. We argue that communities play an underappreciated role in organizational theory – critical not only to occupational identity, knowledge transfer, sense-making, social support, innovation, problem-solving, and collective action but also, enabled by information technology, increasingly providing socioeconomic value – in areas once inhabited by organizations alone. Hence, we posit that organizations may be in the shadow of communities. Rather than push for a common definition, we link communities to an organization's evolution: its birth, growth, and death. We show that communities represent both opportunities and threats to organizations and conclude with a research agenda that more fully accounts for the potential of community forms to be a creator (and a possible destroyer) of value for organizations.

This research paper aims to examine how open innovation (OI) intermediaries facilitate knowledge collaboration between organizations and online user communities. Drawing on a Community of Practice (CoP) perspective on knowledge, the study lays out a framework of the knowledge boundary management mechanisms (and associated practices) that intermediaries deploy in enabling client organizations to engage in online community-based OI.

This research is based on an exploratory case study of an OI intermediary and 18 client organizations that engage with online user communities on the intermediary’s platform. Results incorporate both the intermediary and clients’ perspective, based on analysis of intermediary and client interviews, clients’ online community projects and other archival data.

Results reveal that OI intermediaries deploy three knowledge boundary management mechanisms – syntactic, semantic and pragmatic – each underpinned by a set of practices. Together, these mechanisms enable knowledge transfer, translation and transformation, respectively, and thus lead to cumulatively richer knowledge collaboration outcomes at the organization–community boundary. The findings show that the pragmatic mechanism reinforces both semantic and syntactic mechanisms, and is hence the most critical to achieving effective knowledge collaboration in community-based OI settings.

The findings suggest that OI intermediaries have to implement all three boundary management mechanisms to successfully enable knowledge collaboration for community-based OI. More specifically, intermediaries need to expand their focus beyond the development of digital platforms, to include nuanced efforts at building organizational commitment to community engagement.

Drawing on the CoP view, this study integrates the knowledge management literature into the OI literature to conceptualize the role of OI intermediaries in shaping knowledge collaboration between organizations and communities. In engaging with the interactive nature of knowledge exchange in such multi-actor settings, this research extends the firm-centric theorization of knowledge that currently dominates the existing OI research.

This paper aims to examine the suitability of a social enterprise model for community health promotion organisations working in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. It focuses on organisational culture, social resources and capacity as pre-requisites for entrepreneurial activities.

This paper is based on ethnographic case studies in England, including semi-structured interviews with the organisations’ staff, trustees and external stakeholders; participant observation; creative method workshops with staff; and feedback meetings with staff and trustees.

The paper provides empirical insights into the potential for, and the consequences of, introducing entrepreneurial ways of working to community health promotion organisations. It suggests that pre-existing capacity, competencies and skills, as well as the ability to manage cultural hybridity, are key factors.

Studying three organisations allowed comparative analysis, but time constraints limited access to some stakeholders and meant that the researcher could not be continuously present. Fieldwork generated a series of “snapshots” of each organisation at several time points.

Community health promotion organisations should be mindful of the social and cultural implications of following the entrepreneurial route to income generation. Policymakers need to be more aware of the challenges community health promotion organisations face in taking on entrepreneurial ways of working.

This paper contributes new empirical insights into the process of community health promotion organisations adopting entrepreneurial ways of working. This is underpinned by Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, which provides a new theoretical lens for examining the social and cultural aspects of this transition.

This paper aims to focus on the relationship between the people's perception of livelihood recovery and micro‐social capital to seek more effective disaster support at the community level.

The household survey was conducted for a randomly selected total of 190 households in two divisions of the Ampara District of the Eastern Province, Sri Lanka. The quantitative analysis design captured the extent to which both cognitive and structural social capital factors prescribe people's overall perceptions of livelihood recovery.

The factors which best prescribe people's perceptions of livelihood recovery are formal network in the community, and leadership and trustship of community‐based organizations. The negative coefficient for newly established community‐based non‐governmental organizations (NGOs) after the tsunami assumed a serious aspect of “élite capture”, which implies a dark side of collective action with semi‐forced participation. Participatory design process in the organizations was another negative factor for livelihood recovery.

Further research should consider influencing factors related to religious organizations and conflict issues in the area.

Disaster support for livelihood recovery at the community level needs serious consideration about social factors and power structure of the community, and careful design of a participatory approach to reduce the risk of “élite capture”.

The research facilitated a quantitative analysis on social capital and livelihood recovery, which may be quite rare, and highlights the issue of effectiveness of disaster support at the community level.

This paper aims to offer a New Zealand perspective on how business and community organisations engage to develop mutually beneficial partnerships to tackle pressing social issues. Specifically, the paper seeks to examine the collaboration motivations for business and community partners involved in seven business‐community partnerships in New Zealand.

The paper utilises data from in‐depth, semi‐structured interviews with key business and community managers involved in seven partnerships in New Zealand. The transcripts of the interviews were analysed using elements of content and narrative analysis. Findings to be presented in this paper include: explaining what “partnership” is; understanding a business case; and community organisations' motivations for engaging in partnerships with business.

This research finds that, while partnerships involving business and community organisations may ideally be associated with shared societal concerns, in this study there was a very strong focus on individual community organisation goals and a dominance of business priorities. This was not balanced by an interest in the broader meta‐goals of the partnership.

This paper draws attention to diverse and often competing motivations that characterise business‐community partnerships. The research demonstrates that, while partnerships are often discussed in the context of societal benefits, individual organisations frequently form partnerships primarily for their own instrumental self‐interests. It is hoped that this paper will stimulate understanding of the practical challenges to developing business‐community partnerships, given differences among the partners in goal orientations and expectations.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the role of communities of practice in organizations and their most beneficial effects for both individual and collective development.

Based on a literature review, from the first authoritative texts by Lave and Wenger until the most recent critiques, the paper has attempted to conciliate the individual and the organizational perspectives about this precious tool for knowledge management and creation.

Because of their distinctive features, a joint enterprise, a mutual engagement and a shared repertoire, if strategically managed, might resort to individual and organizational positive outcomes. From an individual perspective, communities could be beneficial in developing professional skills, a stronger sense of identity and finding continuity even during discontinuity and change. From an organizational perspective, communities of practice could help drive the strategy, start new lines of business, solve problems quickly and transfer best practices.

Many limitations about this conceptualization have been presented. Therefore, future research should try to focus on communities within different socio-cultural contexts and within different kinds of organizations.

Practical implications about the use of communities of practice within organizational contexts are mainly linked to the enhancement of human and social capital seen as a strategic, although intangible, asset.

The social implications of this paper are connected to the contribution to the discussion on the theme which is quite uncommon in human resource management research.

The value of this paper is the attempt to connect the communities of practice to human and social capital.

This chapter goes into deeper discussion and consideration of holistic leadership through the concept of holistic leadership presented in Part 1 and analysis of a number of case studies presented in Part 2. The chapter first analyzes and considers the concept of dialectical leadership, which is an element for achieving a balance between centralized leadership and distributed leadership at the psychological boundary layer located at the boundary layer between the formal organizational layer and the informal organizational layer from the perspective of four dimensions: the time axis, spatial axis, strategic axis, and management axis. This is because there is new knowledge gained from multiple case analyses and because dialectical leadership has an impact on management elements in these four dimensions when companies execute strategic knowledge creation processes to achieve business innovation. Second, the chapter discusses the concept of leadership interaction which occurs among leaders at the individual boundaries of the three-layered structure (practice layers) of the informal organization layer located in the business community, the psychological boundary layer located in the boundary layer of the business community, and the formal organization layer located in the formal organization, and the three management layers. Third, as demonstrated in the cases of Apple, Cisco Systems, Dyson, SoftBank, and Sony, strategic collaboration with other companies including customers is extremely important for those practitioners who are promoting business ecosystem strategies across different companies. To achieve this, synchronization of leadership at the three practice layers and three management layers in holistic leadership through boundary negotiations among individual leaderships across different companies is important. These concepts are discussed in this chapter. Fourth, this chapter indicates that excellent holistic leadership is necessary for practitioners to achieve strategic knowledge creation high in quality, but this requires leadership for value creation for the formation of new business communities that originate in the formation of “Ba.” The chapter also indicates that “practical wisdom” is an important element for practitioners in such value creation, and the presence of this element is a necessary condition for generating excellent holistic leadership.

Purpose – To examine the role of Latino community-based nonprofits in integrating first- and second-generation Latino immigrants into mainstream society.

Methodology/approach – This place-based study uses a mixed methods approach to analyze financial and administrative data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics and semi-structured interviews with organizational leaders.

Findings – Latino community-based nonprofits provide a wide range of programs and services to their constituents that promote the social and political mobility of Latino immigrants and their families. Findings also suggest a potential spatial mismatch between Latino-serving nonprofits and the people they serve. The organizations are concentrated in the Washington, DC metropolitan area while the Latino community is branching out into the outer suburbs of Maryland and Virginia. Moreover, different political and administrative structures and policies affect the ability of these nonprofits to serve their constituents.

Research limitations/implications – The study's geographic boundaries may limit the generalizability of spatial mismatch between Latino-serving nonprofits and their constituents. However, the findings about programs and services and the impact of political and administrative structures and policies can be applied to other immigrant-serving organizations.

Practical implications – Policy makers, elected officials, and other stakeholders can learn the importance of Latino and immigrant community-based nonprofits. These organizations act as bridges to the Latino and other immigrant communities.

Social implications – Latino and other immigrant community-based nonprofits are integral to the integration of immigrant communities as active and contributing members of wider society.

Originality/value of paper – This study looks at immigrant integration through the lens of community-based nonprofits.