The Role of Information Technology in Building and Sustaining the Relational Base of Communities

Abstract

The popularity of the concept of communities is growing and so are ideas on how to support these communities with technologies. We can find this particularly in the field of management and organization studies, in which communities are more and more seen as a solution for rigid, hierarchical and conservative bureaucratic structures. In fact, communties can be seen as the latest wave in an ongoing evolution of organizational structures (Wenger, 2000, Lesser, 2000). In the age-old traditional functional organization, concentration of expertise was (and still is) under hierarchical control. In the decades after World War II, and in specific during the seventies, the multi-divisional organization was seen as the answer to the ever-expanding functional organization. Business units were introduced as an organizational structure alternative to the functional division. A decade later, project-based organization entered the organizational landscape. Project teams were designed in order to be closer to the market. Since the mid-nineties, knowledge based organizations have overshadowed the project-based organization, at least that is what popular business press tells us. Communities instead of teams are the dominant structure of the organization, also coined as communities of communities (Brown and Duguid, 1991). Communities differ notably from conventional units of organization, such as teams or work groups. Group theory in general (Hackman, 1990) perceives groups in an organization, as