How do entrepreneurs learn and engage in an online community-of-practice? A case study approach

Hafeez, Khalid, Foroudi, Pantea ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4000-7023, Nguyen, Bang, Gupta, Suraksha and Alghatas, Fathalla (2018) How do entrepreneurs learn and engage in an online community-of-practice? A case study approach. Behaviour and Information Technology, 37 (7) . pp. 714-735. ISSN 0144-929X [Article] (doi:10.1080/0144929X.2018.1474255)

[img]
Preview
PDF - Final accepted version (with author's formatting)
Download (1MB) | Preview

Abstract

This paper investigates the ways in which entrepreneurs use communities of practice (CoPs) to express themselves, using narrative theory and rhetorical analysis, to gain insight into an electronic social network medium, namely, YoungEntrepreneur.com. In particular, the study focuses on CoPs themes, including why entrepreneurs engage in CoPs, what role the moderators and resident entrepreneurs can play in managing online CoPs, on communication rituals of the knowledge sharing through interactivity, and on “how to develop an intervention” to maintain and stimulate entrepreneurs for engaging in on-line community. Findings reveal that topic title plays major role in attracting people. Successful topics with successful conclusion (in terms of the original query was answered) will not necessary get high responses and vice versa. It is observed that the domain expert does not play a big role in keeping the discussion going. Finally, the study also discovered that entrepreneurs like to communicate in story telling genre. A comprehensive set of engagement measurement tools are introduced to effectively measure the engagement in a virtual CoP, along with a classification to define and categorise discourse of messages in terms of content and context, which allow practitioners to understand the effectiveness of a social networking site.

Item Type: Article
Keywords (uncontrolled): Human-Computer Interaction, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), General Social Sciences, Developmental and Educational Psychology
Research Areas: A. > Business School > Marketing, Branding and Tourism
Item ID: 24224
Notes on copyright: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Behaviour and Information Technology on 12/06/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/0144929X.2018.1474255
Useful Links:
Depositing User: Pantea Foroudi
Date Deposited: 03 May 2018 16:30
Last Modified: 29 Nov 2022 19:46
URI: https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/id/eprint/24224

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Statistics

Activity Overview
6 month trend
473Downloads
6 month trend
376Hits

Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.