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The development of electronic information technology and its increasing rate of adoption and implementation is having a major impact upon both the volume of information activity and the levels of employment in information related jobs.

Enterprise social networks (ESN) are increasingly used by companies to reinforce collaboration and knowledge sharing. While prior research has investigated ESN use practices, little is known about potential user roles emerging on these platforms. Against this backdrop, this paper develops an ESN knowledge actor role framework.

The framework is constructed based on a systematic review of literature covering knowledge worker role typologies, user roles identified in public online social spaces as well as findings from ESN research.

The ESN knowledge actor role framework distinguishes eight contributing and two reading roles. It describes the associated participation behaviours and establishes metrics to identify the roles.

Providing a notion of knowledge management-related roles in ESN, the framework enables a better understanding of knowledge processes and the involved actors. Moreover, the paper advances the field of ESN data analytics by designing a set of ESN metrics to characterise user behaviour.

Understanding ESN user roles, in particular regarding their knowledge contributions to the platform, can improve knowledge transparency in companies. The framework may usefully support the identification and management of critical knowledge resources and support decision-making in the areas of human resources management and knowledge management.

Providing a platform for knowledge-intensive interactions as well as record of user activities, ESN are well suited to observe and identify knowledge actor roles emerging in this context.

All seventeen had graciously agreed to my proposal to gather for a small conference to seek consensus. A generous grant from the Pierian Press Foundation would cover all of our expenses for a long weekend at a resort hotel; the only condition of the grant was that we offer our results to Reference Services Review for first publication. Over the past five years each of the seventeen had in turn accepted my challenge to answer the following question:

The purpose of this paper is to present a discussion of the ways that personality tests have been used in accounting research.

The paper is structured as a literature review of the personality testing area, with particular emphasis on its application in accounting research.

The idea of personality impacting accounting has received some attention in recent years. However, it is an understudied area and the research to date is somewhat inconclusive. The findings are that over the last decade personality psychologists have made significant advances in personality theory and measurement. This paper summarizes: the theory of personality; the two most common personality typologies (i.e. the Jungian psychology‐based Myers‐Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Five Factor Model (FFM); and discusses the application of personality in accounting research.

It is somewhat problematical to draw precise boundaries that include all relevant studies, and yet exclude appropriately distant ones, as there are a number of constructs that may, or may not, be considered to be “personality”. Another limitation is that the research studies published so far do not all agree one with another.

The conclusion reached is that, while there is a role for personality/accounting research using both MBTI and FFM, research using the FFM is particularly important for analytical and predictive research in this area and to triangulate previous MBTI studies.

As a literature review, there is little that is intrinsically new here, but the juxtaposition of different approaches and findings will be informative to researchers in the area and, to a lesser extent, practitioners.

States that any decision aid assumes certain characteristics about the problem it is applied to. Proposes that the marketing situation is particularly one of aggregation – the marketing manager is continually facing the problem of aggregating individual behaviour into market responses which is the key determinant of his actions. Concludes that the fact that operational managers continue to use some techniques and reject others may not be related so much to ignorance of more sophisticated methods as to an explicit or implicit assessment of their relevance to the practical problems. The basic aim of the research is to investigate further this aspect in the area of decision aids to marketing.

This paper seeks to describe the changing organizational environment and stakeholder debate currently taking place in various “issue arenas” during a crisis. Organizations today need to find and monitor these arenas before being able to communicate with their stakeholders.

Communications of authorities and discussions by citizens are studied and analyzed in a case study related to the 2009 swine flu or influenza A (H1N1) episode in Finland. The organizational point of view is studied through media releases of the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), and the citizen point of view through a content analysis of popular discussion online forums through which the authorities attempted an intervention.

The analysis of the media releases revealed that the crisis communication of the authorities was timely and factual, yet failed both in using understandable concepts and responding to the emotional needs of people threatened by swine‐flu and questioning the safety of the vaccination. These deficiencies intensified emotion‐driven discussion, and when people opposed to vaccination managed to secure the central “issue arenas” using the words “swine flu” online, this led to online speculations and exaggeration of threat, excluding the authorities and logical argument from the discussion.

This study only looks at the swine‐flu debate from the points of view of the authorities and citizens, and does not discuss the role of the legacy media, for example. Since this study focused on one country, a global comparison could be the next step.

This study argues that success in communication today depends heavily on using the right language, finding the right issue arenas, getting there early, and answering the needs raised in those arenas. It is crucial for authorities as well as public relations practitioners to acknowledge these changes in communication in order to be able to deliver their messages.

The concept of issue arenas can help to clarify changing perspectives in communication management. Moreover, the study is timely as it focuses on a global topic – pandemics and their communication. The results demonstrate how lack of monitoring and belated activity may lead to online issue arenas being dominated by extreme groups, who then strongly shape public opinion. Practitioners and scholars need to focus on identifying issues and stakeholder needs, and to understand the dynamics of the arenas concerning them.

Chinese internet literature (CIL) platforms afford freedom for creative expression and opportunities for direct interactions between writers and fans and among fans. Enabled by these platforms' technological and commercial arrangement, a new form of literary production and consumption has emerged, the most significant of which is the role of fans participation. A social network analysis of the interaction patterns in online fan communities was conducted to investigate fan communication activities at scale. Of particular interest is how the socio-technical system of the site influences its network topology.

Online forums for 10 popular fiction titles in Qidian, the leading CIL platform, were analyzed. Social networks were constructed based on a post–reply–reply threaded discussion structure. Various aspects of fan interactions were analyzed, including number of replies per post, post length and emerging network patterns.

Similarities in network topology shared by CIL fan forums and other online communities, such as small-world and scale properties, were discovered; however, distinct network dynamics were also identified. Consistent with previous findings, writers and moderators, along with a few highly ranked fans, occupied the central positions in the network. This was due to their social roles and the nature of their posts rather than, as the conventional explanation goes, preferential attachment.

The findings demonstrate how community-specific circumstances and norms influence interaction patterns and the resultant network structure. It was revealed that in the CIL sites, the users adopted the technologies in unexpected ways. And the resulting network topology can be attributed to the interplay between the sites' official arrangement and users' adaptive tactics.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-11-2021-0596.