Escapist Motives for Playing On-Line Games: Preliminary Results from an Exploratory Survey

Social games have become popular along with the tremendous growth of social networking sites, esp. Facebook. There is a gap in literature on what motivates people to play Facebook games. This paper studies social games usage behavior of students. We focus on escapist reasons, based on Warmelink, Harteveld and Mayer’s framework (2009) of escapist motives, which identifies four main motives for playing on-line games: mundane breaking, stress relieving, pleasure seeking, and imagination conjuring. In the paper, we report preliminary findings from an exploratory questionnaire survey. Besides importance of escapist motives for playing Facebook and other on-line games, we investigate how they are linked to demographic data such as: age, gender, place of origin, along with other social interactions patterns and social network usage behavior, current gaming status and an estimate of gaming time. According to our study, only 10% of respondents, who have started to play Facebook games, continued to play them. The most important motives for playing games is mundane breaking, the second reason is pleasure seeking, the third is stress relieving, and the least important is imagination conjuring

Understanding the Business Value of Social Information Systems – A Research Agenda

The creation of value by social information systems has been confirmed by recent studies. However, few is known about the mechanisms that create value in so-cial information systems. Therefore, this article investi-gates how social information systems create value. We analyze which and how these value-creating interac-tions appear in different types of social information systems. Based on a literature review, we identify four emergent interactions in social information systems that create value: social production, co-creation, weak ties, and egalitarian decisions. Using our findings, we develop a research agenda to further explore the value creation mechanisms of social information systems

Leveraging Emergent Social Interactions for Value Co-Creation on Transaction Platforms

Transaction platforms supporting the exchange of services and products between actor groups are the foundation of many new business models. Attracting enough actors by propositioning value is crucial for the success of transaction platforms. Therefore, the proper design of value creation mechanisms is a pre-condition to be successful. Initially, the focus of value creation was on network effects, but now the interactions between the actors are being examined more closely. Emergent social interactions (ESI) – are initiated by users on their initiative and are not subject to top-down planning. However, their impact on value creation on transaction platforms has not been researched in depth. Therefore, our paper investigates how emergent social interactions contribute to value co-creation mechanisms on transaction platforms. We apply a Service-Dominant Logic (S-D logic) theoretical lens and create a framework that describes the impact of emergent social interactions on value co-creation. Our framework integrates the moderation of ESI-based value-co-creation by market properties. Based on the framework, platform designers and entrepreneurs can better decide on the design of trans-action platforms in general and the employment of emergent social interactions. Our theoretical contribution paves the way to developing methods for designing transactional platforms using emergent social interactions respecting the context set by market properties

Emergent Collaboration on Twitter: A Case Study of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

This paper explores the organizing elements that foster emergent collaboration within large-scale communities on online social platforms like Twitter. This study is based on a case study of the #BlackLivesMatter social movement and draws on organizing dynamics and online social network literature, combined with the analysis of 2050 tweets collected from days where the movement had high levels of activity. Drawing on the literature review, we propose a framework consisting of three organizing elements: structure, engagement, and communicative content that are essential in analyzing online collaboration. This paper uses this framework to analyze the collected tweets and identify how actors organize and engage in large-scale communities founded by emergent online collaboration. This paper identifies characteristics of how these key elements and a dynamic interplay between the two logics of action foster emergent collaboration in social movements using Twitter

Towards a Group Formation Methodology

Group work has been adopted as an important tool to support collaborative work in order to enhance learning processes. There is a wealth of literature related to group performance and the impact of group composition on group and individual performance. However, very few studies address the issue on how to automatically form groups. This article proposes a methodology that could be used by professors to form groups automatically taking into account different criteria as well as the students’ profile. This methodology is based on a pilot study that analyzes group composition of self-formed student groups. The pilot study findings suggest that students tend to form homogeneous group in terms of level of the knowledge. Furthermore, students report that working on common topics of interests was a decisive factor in forming the groups

Self-formed Groups versus Automatically-formed Groups

Group work has been adopted as an important tool to support collaborative work in order to enhance learning processes. There is a wealth of literature related to group performance and the impact of group composition on group and individual performance. However, very few studies address the issue on how to automatically form groups. This article proposes a methodology that could be used by professors to form groups automatically taking into account different criteria as well as the students’ profile. This methodology is based on a pilot study that analyzes group composition of self-formed student groups

THE PERCEIVED BUSINESS VALUE OF SOCIAL MEDIA AT WORK

Social Media is a new phenomenon that impacts businesses, society and individuals. Social media has swept into the business world, disrupting businesses, bringing new opportunities and challenges. The use of social media in organizations has the potential to shape the “future of the work”. Both consultancy reports and scholarly articles highlight and discuss the new opportunities and organizational benefits provided by social media to change the current top-down (i.e. initiated by management) business model to a more collaborative and bottom-up (i.e. initiated by employees) approach. Such a model is customizable to specific user needs, empowering employees to design specific workflows thus helping them to work more effectively. Using social media, personal knowledge can be synergized into collective knowledge through social collaborative processes that may facilitate externalization of knowledge, fostering creativity and innovation. All these processes have the potential to lead to knowledge creation through interaction and collaborative processes and thereby increase companies’ competitiveness. However the successful deployment of social media for internal communication and facilitation of knowledge sharing and collaboration in organizations is difficult. Based on quantitative as well as qualitative data from 13 Danish organizations, we investigate the following research question: What is the business value of social media in organizations as perceived by the employees? Based on the data analysis, the paper derives a model of factors associated with the perceived business value of social media

Towards a Model of Collaborative Intention: An Empirical Investigation of a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC)

Disentangling factors that affect one’s intention to collaborate is an important endeavor for management education, especially for globally dispersed groups of students. Drawing on a synthesis of four theories, we advance a model of collaboration intentions that embodies both individual and communal level drivers of individuals’ intention to participate in virtual collaboration. The model is validated based on data collected from 2,517 participants in a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC). Results demonstrate that attitudes towards virtual collaboration are predicted by both collaborative outcome expectancy and communal support expectancy. Additionally, we reveal that collaborative outcome expectancy is predicated on individuals’ belief about his/her ability to collaborate whereas communal support expectancy is impacted by the individual’s perception of communal influence