Who contributes knowledge? Embeddedness and marginality in online communities

Abstract

This paper applies a multiple embeddedness perspective to better understand individual knowledge contribution in online communities. The community of practice and open innovation perspectives suggest different answers to the question: who is most likely to contribute knowledge in online communities? Viewed from a community of practice perspective, the most deeply embedded members of an online community are most likely to contribute knowledge. Conversely, from an open innovation perspective, solutions to local problems are more likely to be provided by peripheral participants from the margins contributors who are not embeddeded in the community. By extending the conceptualization of embeddedness to encompass not only social embeddedness, but also epistemic embeddedness, we resolve these conflicting predictions. Neither the community of practice nor the open innovation perspective individually explains knowledge contribution in online communities. Instead, using data regarding 88,472 participants at 51 Stack Exchange problem-solving online communities, we find that individuals who are socially embedded and epistemically marginal are more likely to make valuable knowledge contributions. We develop a novel approach to measuring epistemic embeddedness, using topic models, and also demonstrate that social embeddedness and epistemic marginality exhibit a considerable complementary interaction.