Abstract
Blogs have emerged as an innovative tool for sharing information and knowledge, and they command significant interest from information technology (IT) users as well as providers. Our study establishes a research framework to provide an understanding of the factors affecting knowledge sharing among bloggers in online social networks. The research results indicate that bloggers' trust, strength of social ties, and reciprocity all have a positive effect on their knowledge-sharing behavior. Further, the impact of each factor on such behavior varies by gender. Our results provide evidence that offline expected social norms tend to persist in the online blogosphere and that gender differences need to be considered as a significant factor in understanding the IT usage behavior in the context of social capital theory. For IT managers and blog service providers, our results also highlight the importance of being gender aware in an effort to elicit participation from all constituent members for the successful adoption and usage of blogs as a knowledge-sharing mechanism.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 309-342 |
Number of pages | 34 |
Journal | Journal of Management Information Systems |
Volume | 28 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Jan 2011 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:h. Ra g h av Ra o is SuNY Distinguished Service Professor of management science and systems at the university at Buffalo, New York, and World Class university Visiting Professor in the Department of Service Systems Management and Engineering, Sogang university, korea. he received his Ph.D. in management information systems from Purdue university, MBa in information systems from the university of Delhi, and bachelor of technology in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of technology. he has published over 130 papers in journals such as Management Science, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Management Information Systems, Information Systems Research, Decision Support Systems, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, and Information Systems Frontiers. he has won best paper and best paper runner-up awards at ICIS and aMCIS and in Information Systems Research. he is, or has been, senior editor and association editor of several top-tier journals. his research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense.
Funding Information:
Acknowledgments: the authors thank the Editor-in-Chief and the anonymous referees for comments that greatly improved this paper. they also thank attendees at a symposium at Sogang university, particularly Wynne Chin, Fred Davis, jaeki Song, and Vijay Sugumaran, for their critical comments. this research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 0916612. the research of the third author was funded in part by Sogang Business School’s World Class university Project (R31-20002), funded by korea Research Foundation and by Sogang university Research Fund. the usual disclaimer applies.
Keywords
- bloggers
- blogs
- gender
- information privacy
- knowledge sharing
- trust