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

The popularity of the concept of communities is growing, and so are ideas on how to support these communities with technologies. We see this especially in the field of management and organization studies where communities are increasingly seen as a solution for the problems of rigid, hierarchical and conservative bureaucratic structures. According to some scholars, communities are the latest wave in an ongoing evolution of organizational structures (Ackerman et al., 2003a; Prusak & Davenport, 1998; Cohen & Prusak, 2002; Huysman & De Wit, 2002; Lesser, 2000; Wenger, 1998; Brown & Duguid, 1991). In the decades after World War II, especially in the 1970s, the multidivisional organization was seen as the answer to the problems faced by the ever-expanding functional organization. A decade later, the project-based organization became the preferred configuration. Since the mid-1990s, knowledge-based organizations, which are built around communities instead of teams, have become popular. Communities differ notably from conventional units of organization, such as teams or work groups. Groups in an organization are canonical, bounded entities that are sanctioned and organized by that organization and its tasks (Hackman, 1990). In contrast, communities are “often non-canonical and not recognized by the organization” (Brown & Duguid, 1991). Their greatest strength is