A structuration approach to online communities of practice: The case of Q&A communities.

Shachaf, Pnina and Rosenbaum, Howard A structuration approach to online communities of practice: The case of Q&A communities. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 2010. [Journal article (Paginated)]

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English abstract

This article describes an approach based on structuration theory (Giddens, 1979, 1984; Orlikowski, 1992, 2000) and communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) that can be used to guide investigation into the dynamics of online question and answer (Q&A) communities. This approach is useful because most research on Q&A sites has focused attention on information retrieval, information seeking behavior, and information intermediation and has assumed uncritically that the online Q&A community plays an important role in these domains of study. Assuming instead that research on online communities should take into account social, technical, and contextual factors (Kling, Rosenbaum, & Sawyer, 2005), the utility of this approach is demonstrated with an analysis of three online Q&A communities seen as communities of practice. This article makes a theoretical contribution to the study of online Q&A communities and, more generally, to the domain of social reference.

Item type: Journal article (Paginated)
Keywords: Q&A
Subjects: B. Information use and sociology of information
Depositing user: Pnina Shachaf
Date deposited: 12 Apr 2011
Last modified: 02 Oct 2014 12:18
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10760/15528

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