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Knowledge capturing and sharing within an organization have been extensively studied in the literature. In this stream of work, an influential focus is on the process of encoding and managing knowledge to enable effective reuse within the organization. With the advancement of internet and web technologies, there is an increased interest in the study of knowledge flows in online communities. The authors highlight in this paper the fact that the boundaries between internal and external organizational knowledge are disappearing, mainly due to the extensive use of online-based platforms to support organizational operations. The authors believe that this will affect the activities of knowledge management in today’s businesses. The purpose of this paper is to provide guidelines for organizations on how to bridge their internal and external knowledge using an integrated semantic approach.

In this paper the authors review two classes of approaches, those that target internal organizational knowledge, and those that target online knowledge flow processes. Then the authors identify the challenges involved in today’s knowledge environments. To address those challenges, the authors propose a framework to bridge and integrate internal and external organizational knowledge. The authors map the activities handled in the framework to the existing knowledge management activities identified from the literature, and highlight how emerging technologies are used to support such activities along the knowledge management process. The authors apply the approach in the context of an organization’s process that heavily depends on the appropriate alignment of internal and external knowledge. The authors focus on the use of emerging technologies that support collaboration and the generation of explicit and reusable semantics.

Interaction points within organizations can be used to define the scope of knowledge exchanged. Following a methodology around the proposed framework, it is feasible to create conceptual connections around internal and external knowledge through explicit semantics. Such connections that are created to support online communities’ knowledge exchange can be applied to internal organizational knowledge, and used as a bridge to external knowledge sources.

The paper provides a roadmap for organizations on how to manage organizational knowledge processes in a coherent and collaborative semantic platform, with a view to what is available outside the boundaries of an organization.

This study investigates team leadership and coordination during a trauma resuscitation. A trauma resuscitation team is an emergency cross- functional medical team, which includes several specialists such as a surgeon, an anesthesia provider, and nurses. The main purpose of the team is to perform a resuscitation; treatment to a patient who experiences a trauma (e.g. car crash, stabbing, gunshot) and has a life-threatening injury. The trauma team can be seen as a type of crisis team since the need for treatment is quite intense and urgent. Team members must treat and stabilize the patient within minutes and without much information about his/her condition and medical history. As a result, this team is working in an intense and highly stressful situation. We used focused ethnography in order to gain an understanding of leadership and coordination during a trauma resuscitation. Over a period of six months, we observed admissions, shadowed teams, and interviewed specialists as a primary data collection method. Our findings suggest that the effectiveness of leadership differs depending on: (1) the severity level of patient condition; and (2) the level of team experience. Directive leadership is more effective when a patient is severely injured, whereas empowering leadership is more effective when a patient is not severely injured. Also, directive leadership is better when a trauma team is inexperienced, but empowering leader- ship is better when a trauma team has a high level of experience.

Much of IT research focuses on issues of adoption and adaptation of established technology artifacts by users and organizations and has neglected issues of how new technologies come into existence and evolve. To fill this gap, this paper depicts a complex picture of technology evolution to illustrate the development of Web browser technology. Building on actor‐network theory as a basis for studying complex technology evolution processes, it explores the emergence of the browser using content analysis techniques on archival data from 1993‐1998. Identifies three processes of inscribing, translating, and framing that clarify how actors acted and reacted to each other and to the emergent technological definition of the browser. This spiral development pattern incorporates complex interplay between base beliefs about what a browser is, artifacts that are the instantiation of those beliefs, evaluation routines that compare the evolving artifact to collective expectations, and strategic moves that attempt to skew the development process to someone's advantage. This approach clarifies the complex interdependence of disparate elements that over time produced the Web browser as it is known today.

Following a third‐generation knowledge management (KM) approach, this article aims to report on a three‐year series of practitioners' experiences engaged in a consensus‐building exercise known as the MAKCi exercise.

Designed to illustrate a real‐world KM case, this research work used participant observation, on‐line interactions and interviews as methodological tools to explore how knowledge management as a discipline has benefited from the use of Web 2.0 technology.

The first part of the article depicts the Most Admired Knowledge City (MAKCi) exercise as a research and learning space networked and tightly connected on‐line by common interests of participants. The second part of the article brings further understanding on how networked learning and knowledge creation has been made possible by the use of Web 2.0 tools. It is advanced that higher levels of knowledge co‐creation at a global scale can take the shape of networks of practice (NoPs) in knowledge‐based development contexts such as the one explored for the MAKCi exercise.

The research is limited to a three‐year recording of practitioners' experiences.

Knowledge‐based social systems, such as networks of practice (NoPs) are identified as emerging social configurations fostering knowledge‐intensive networked learning. NoPs clearly depend on collaboration within networks. Thus, the paper advances that some emerging models of knowledge‐intensive networks such as (NoPs) are natural KM vehicles to foster and promote intensive tacit knowledge conversion into explicit scholarly knowledge regardless of geographical location, becoming highly relevant to knowledge‐based development (KBD) practitioners.

The current study aims to investigate the factors that impact the feedback received on answers to questions in social Q&A communities and whether the expertise-required question influences the role of these factors on the feedback.

To understand the antecedents and consequences that influence the feedback received on answers to online community questions, the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) is applied in this study. The authors use web data crawling methods and a combination of quantitative analyses. The data for this study came from Zhihu; in total, 353,775 responses were obtained to 1,531 questions, ranging from 49 to 23,681 responses per question. Each answer received 0 to 113,892 likes and 0 to 6,250 comments.

The answers' cognitive and emotional components and the answerer's influence positively affect user feedback behavior. In addition, the expertise-required question moderates the effects of the answer's cognitive component and emotional component on the user feedback, moderating the effects of the answerer's influence on the user approval feedback.

This study builds upon a limited yet growing body of literature on a theme of great relevance to scholars, practitioners and social media users concerning the effects of the connotation of answers (i.e. their cognitive and emotional components) and the answerer's influence on user feedback (i.e. approval and collaborative feedback) in social Q&A communities. The authors further consider the moderating role of the domain expertise required by the question (expertise-required question). The ELM model is applied to explore the relationships between questions, answers and feedback. The findings of this study add a new perspective to the research on user feedback and have implications for the management of social Q&A communities.

In this editorial introduction Allen Lee's definition of the information systems (IS) field is taken as the starting point: “Research in the information systems field examines more than just the technological system, or just the social system, or even the two systems side by side; in addition, it investigates the phenomena that emerge when the two interact” (Lee, A. “Editorial”, MISQ, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2001, p. iii). By emphasizing the last part of this, it is argued that actor‐network theory (ANT) can provide IS research with unique and very powerful tools to help us overcome the current poor understanding of the information technology (IT) artifact (Orlikowski, W. and Iacono, S., “Research commentary: desperately seeking the ‘IT’ in IT research – a call for theorizing the IT artifact”, Information Systems Research, Vol. 10 No. 2, 2001, pp. 121‐34). These tools include a broad range of concepts describing the interwoven relationships between the social.

This study aims to take a public goods approach to understand relationships between collecting and contributing knowledge to an online knowledge sharing portal (KSP), mental model processing and outcomes at the individual and collective levels.

This study reports on a survey (N = 602) among tax professionals, examining the perceived individual and collective benefits and costs associated with collecting and contributing knowledge. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

Collecting and contributing knowledge led to considerable mental model processing of the knowledge. That in turn significantly influenced (primarily) individual and (some) collective costs and benefits. Results varied by the kinds of knowledge sharing. Whether directly from knowledge sharing, or mediated through mental modeling, the perceived costs and benefits may be internalized as an individual good rather than being interpreted at the collective level as a public good.

The study is situated in the early stages of a wiki-type online KSP. A focus on the learning potential of the system could serve to draw in new users and contributors, heightening perceptions of the public goods dimension of a KSP.

A focus on the learning potential of the system could serve to draw in new users, and thus the number of subsequent contributors, heightening perceptions of the collective, public goods dimension of a KSP.

This study explores how knowledge sharing and mental model processing are directly and indirectly associated with individual and collective costs and benefits. As online knowledge sharing is both an individual and public good, costs and benefits must be considered from both perspectives.

This paper aims to present a conceptual framework of four knowledge co-creation processes in enterprise social media (ESM). From an interactionist perspective, the paper proposes a model on the role of ESM and enterprise social networks (ESNs) in facilitating knowledge co-creation processes.

This conceptual paper revisits existing literature on ESM, ESNs and social knowledge management to propose, hypothetically, the relationship between ESM, ESN and knowledge co-creation processes.

ESM enhances employee-to-employee interaction, which allows employees to co-create knowledge in a social context. Firstly, ESM affords employees to create ESNs for knowledge co-creation. Secondly, the structure of employee-to-employee interaction in ESNs will influence knowledge co-creation processes. Thirdly, ESNs provide the mechanism through which ESM affordances enable or constrain knowledge co-creation in the organisation.

ESM creates a social context that allows employees to share, apply and recreate or reproduce knowledge in the process of knowledge co-creation. The action possibilities of ESM perceived and actualised by employees will enable or constrain knowledge co-creation. Such influences are fuelled by the structural properties of employee relationships on ESM.

The paper elucidates the concept of knowledge co-creation based on a representation of user activities in ESM. This paper suggests that knowledge co-creation is a salient outcome of both individual-to-individual interactions on ESM and individual-to-ESM interactions enabled by ESM affordances.