Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems

Socio-technical systems are social systems that incorporate technological infrastructures. At the group level of analysis, the most important question in understanding socio-technical systems is how their technological infrastructures modulate collective capacities for performance and experience. This research addresses collective capacities with respect to various sorts of communities—interest communities, professional communities, and residential communities. One question the authors have pursued is how technological infrastructures can enhance beliefs about collective capacities, as operationalized in Bandura’s social-cognitive construct “collective efficacy”. In this chapter, the authors first review Bandura’s conception of collective efficacy as a social extension of his cognitive construct “perceived self-efficacy”. They then discuss the development of our own community collective efficacy scale, and its use in understanding a range of community-oriented attitudes, beliefs and behaviors in the context of the Blacksburg Electronic Village community network. The next three sections describe applications and extensions of community collective efficacy to three on-going community informatics projects. In each of these cases, the authors explain how the community collective efficacy construct is being applied and extended.