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Social media has significantly impacted the value creation processes within the consumer–brand relationship. This study aims to examine value formation processes within a cosmetics social media brand community and to establish the types of value formation associated with different categories of interactions within a social media brand community.

The research adopted a netnographic approach and followed the operational protocols of netnography. Conversations in one large cosmetics social media brand community were observed and downloaded for analysis over a two-month period. Examples of value-creation and formation processes were identified using netnographic interpretative procedures to develop higher-order themes.

The findings supported the creation of a “Consumer and brand value creation and co-creation framework” highlighting disparate value types within the following interactions: consumer-to-consumer; brand-to-consumer; and consumer-to-brand. The identified value types were specific to the actors (i.e. consumers and brands) involved in value formation processes. The analysis also revealed consumers’ ability to independently generate value through direct interaction with a social media brand community and the brands’ role in supporting consumers in value formation through value facilitation.

The pivotal role of disparate actors’ interactions in value formation processes is highlighted, alongside the autonomous ability to form value with the aid of resources stored and shared within the social media brand community. The network of interactions and value-creation processes contribute to a holistic understanding of the interactions in a social media brand community. Furthermore, the research explores and highlights the emerging role of social media brand communities as “value vestiges”.

This chapter focuses on the importance of social media for pop culture fans. A web survey for fans of the Twilight Saga is implemented, using the concepts of cognitive, affective, and evaluative social identity and personal, product, and situational involvement. The purpose is to examine to what degree social identity and involvement can explain pop culture fans’ future intention to travel, make recommendations to others, and use social media. Findings show that pop culture fans use social media to a large extent and that these means are important for making decisions about traveling and event participation. Moreover, the chapter shows that involvement dimensions are more important than social identity dimensions to explain future intention to travel, to recommend to others, and to use social media.

Using Brazilian communities in the Greater Boston area as the focus of the study, this chapter will address the following main questions: Are there differences between Protestant and Catholic churches in terms of their impact on the creation and development of social capital? And, if such differences exist, how do membership and involvement in the churches’ social networks affect ethnic entrepreneurship? Our preliminary conclusions suggest that there are various differences between the two churches in aspects that have the potential to impact social capital, and that the social networks built around and supported by the Brazilian Protestant churches in Massachusetts have been more effective for social capital formation. In consequence, these churches provide a “safer” environment, with higher levels of perceived solidarity and trust, and as such more favorable for ethnic entrepreneurship initiatives and social mobility. In order to lay the theoretical ground for addressing these questions, we will make a brief review of existing research on the association between social capital and ethnic entrepreneurship. We will also discuss the issue of church-membership as a source of social capital creation and growth, and its effects on ethnic business development.¹

This study analyses how media choices can be used in the construction of social identity.

We approach the topic through the analytical lens of identity work. We present a case study of a community of IT students during their first year of studies, including participant observation, focus groups, and surveys. We focus on what community means to the individuals located within a specific social context. This allows us to examine ICT use and adoption holistically as a key aspect of community formation and identity maintenance.

We depict everyday interactions in which the choice of an older information communication technology, Internet Relay Chat, serves participants in their quest for social belongingness in their community and in distinguishing the community positively from other social groups. This chapter describes how identity work is accomplished by adopting and valuing shared, social views about users versus non-users, including: (1) emphasizing the skills and efforts needed for using Internet Relay Chat (IRC), (2) undermining the use of other technologies, and (3) deploying and referencing IRC jargon and “insider humor” within the broader community.

By examining online and offline social interactions in a defined community over time, we expose the process of identity work in a holistic manner. Our analysis emphasizes the underlying process where media choices can be harnessed to fulfill the need to identify with groups and feel affirmed in one’s claims to both personal and social identity.

Based on the perspectives of social capital, image motivation and motivation affordances, this paper explores the direct and moderation effects of different kinds of motivations (i.e. relationship-based motivation, community-based motivation and individual-based motivation) on users' continuous knowledge contributions in social question and answer (Q&A) communities.

The authors collect the panel data of 10,193 users from a popular social Q&A community in China. Then, a negative binomial regression model is adopted to analyze the collected data.

The paper demonstrates that social learning, peer recognition and knowledge seeking positively affect users' continuous contribution behaviors. However, the results also show that social exposure has the opposite effect. In addition, self-presentation is found to moderate the influence of social factors on users' continuous use behaviors, while the moderation effect of motivation affordances has no significance.

First, this study develops a comprehensive motivation framework that helps gain deeper insights into the underlying mechanism of knowledge contribution in social Q&A communities. Second, this study conducts panel data analysis to capture the impacts of motivations over time, rather than intentions at a fixed time point. Third, the findings can help operators of social Q&A communities to optimize community norms and incentive mechanisms.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of social media affordances, specifically social engagement and social endorsement, on knowledge contribution in online Q&A communities. Building on self-determination theory, this research seeks to tackle the issue of under-provision of knowledge in these communities.

The study employs a sample collected from a popular social Q&A community in China and uses linear panel data models along with multiple robustness checks to test the research model.

The findings reveal that both social engagement and social endorsement have a positive effect on users' knowledge contribution to the online Q&A community. However, the impact of social engagement is mitigated by social endorsement.

This paper makes a valuable contribution to the field by filling the research gap on the role of social engagement behaviors and their interaction with social endorsement in online Q&A communities. The results provide insights into how social media affordances can be leveraged to enhance knowledge contribution in these communities.

The purpose of this paper is to present a model of democratic therapeutic community (DTC) for people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and psychotic disorder, namely the Group-Apartment (GA). The authors will describe it in more detail, discussing the ideas which lie behind it, considering the relative cost of treating people in larger residential DTCs and in GAs, outlining findings from the first data gathered on a GA and looking at the usefulness of this model in post-modern societies, with particular reference to Sicily.

In brief a GA is a flat, located in an urban apartment building, inhabited by a small group of people. In this paper the authors consider an apartment inhabited by a group of three or four patients with the presence of clinical social workers who work in shifts for several hours a day on all or most days of the week (Barone et al., 2009, 2010). GA is also inspired by the pioneering work of Pullen (1999, 2003), in the UK tradition of the apartment post TC for psychosis.

GAs in Italy have become one of the main methods of support housing in recovery-oriented treatment, because it allows the empowerment of the users and fights against the stigma of mental illness (Barone et al., 2014; Bruschetta et al., 2014). The main therapeutic activities provided in the GA depend on the type of recovery route being supported, on the level of autonomy being developed and on the level of participation in the democratic life of the local community.

GAs appear better, cheaper and a more appropriate treatment for mental problems in the current financial and social climate than larger institutions. Where they have been tried out, they have been found to be effective, by users and by stakeholders. They exemplify the advantages of the DTC for encouraging recovery, but cost less to run. In accordance with DTC principles, the social democratic process is used not only to evaluate the clinical effectiveness of GAs, but also to build a network to support the development of innovative mental health services and new enabling environments (Haigh et al., 2012).

This study aims to examine how the social capital embedded in health communities influences the knowledge sharing of participating members and drives their organic food consumption.

The structural equation modeling method was used to analyze 228 group members in health knowledge communities established by multi-level marketing firms. Non-response bias was also assessed statistically and appropriate measures taken to minimise the impact of common method variance.

The empirical results showed that: structural capital has no significant relationship with members' knowledge sharing; both the relational and cognitive capital positively affect members' knowledge sharing; members' knowledge collecting behaviour positively affects their purchase intention toward organic foods, but their knowledge donating behaviour has no significant effect; members' purchase intention toward organic foods positively affects their actual purchase behaviour.

This paper indicates that higher quality of social capital embedded in that health community would increase more interactive opportunities for participating consumers to understand the organic foods through community activities, and strengthen the organic food value cognition of community members. Hence, companies can make good use of health communities to modify the customers' value propositions, thereby driving their organic food consumptions.

Unlike many other empirical studies, this study makes an important contribution to the literature by examining how social capital influences consumers' organic food consumption and their adoption of organic food's values in a detailed manner.