The role of cognitive conflict in open-content collaboration

IS research on participant’s motivation1 in Knowledge Management System have paid relatively limited attention to the effect of diversifying the technological artifacts while they focused more on identifying the generic motivational factors that apply across the varying contexts. However, the manifest success of disruptive collaboration system outside of the corporate boundaries such as Wikipedia calls for our extended attention to the motivational factors that may not be emergent without the provision of context and artifacts that challenge the assumptions made by KMS within the organizational setting. Through the online survey of 100 Wikipedians, this study evaluates the effect of one novel construct (i.e., socio-cognitive conflict) proposed by Cress and Kimmerle (2008) as an example of such emergent motivation made explicit by maneuvering specific design of collaboration system which otherwise would remain immaterial. In parallel, the analysis also explores the generic motivational constructs the effects of which have been extensively studied within organizational contexts but not sufficiently examined outside of such boundaries

HOW MANY TECHNOLOGY TYPES ARE THERE? PRELIMINARY RESULTS FROM THE TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE LITERATURE

To investigate a generalizable moderating effect of the type of technology tested upon its acceptance, a classification of technologies is needed. This study aims to develop a preliminary framework to describe information technologies based upon 200 randomly selected technology descriptions taken from a comprehensive TAM meta-analysis effort currently in progress. We report on the use of a classification method involving both human judgment and statistical techniques. A manual sorting process is followed by multidimensional scaling (MDS) and cluster analysis to aggregate the individual interpretations of the sorters into hierarchical cluster structures. The results of this method reveal several potential technology grouping solutions, one of which was selected for further discussion. Limitations and future research are also discussed