The organizing of online community: Fluid and structuring organizing

Abstract

Online community (OC) has become an important social mechanism for people to share and exchange information and collaborate remotely. More and more firms start to create their own OCs for better communication with their customers. Yet, without proper administration, the success rate of these OCs remains very low. Traditionally, a view informed by structuralism is often applied to understand the organizing of OCs. Recently, fluidity was proposed as an alternative view. We argue that in reality both structuring and fluid organizing co-exist in OCs. By integrating two views together, we aim to provide a deeper comprehensive understanding on the organizing of OCs. We propose a sequence analysis-based narrative approach to investigate the unfolding process of the tensions emerged from the co-existence of two organizing forms. We expect this research will contribute to our theoretical understanding on the organizing of OCs and also provide suggestions for firms to better manage their OCs.