Knowledge co-creation in online communities: How members of an investing related Facebook group create knowledge collectively

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Volume Title

School of Business | Master's thesis

Date

2020

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Management and International Business (MIB)

Language

en

Pages

70

Series

Abstract

Knowledge has become one of the most valued assets of contemporary society on both individual and organizational levels, while the technological advancements have made the flow of knowledge among people simpler than ever. The purpose of this Master’s thesis is to extend the understanding of the knowledge co-creation process within informal online environments by answering the following research question: ‘How is knowledge being co-created through the informal peer-to-peer interactions between members of a Finnish Facebook group?’ More specifically, I aim to explore the knowledge co-creation process by analyzing participants’ interactions within a Finnish Facebook group denominated as Sijoituskerho (trans. Investment club) that centralizes around investing. The theoretical framework of the study draws from studies that have focused on online communities, knowledge, and collective creation of knowledge. An extensive literature review strives to construct a framework from these disciplines. In this thesis, I explore the knowledge creation process through a social constructivist view and employ a qualitative research approach. More specifically, I employ a qualitative content analysis model widely utilized in computer-mediated learning environments, the Interaction Analysis Model (IAM), to examine the phenomenon and accomplish themes for further research. The research data consists of 241 messages written over 19 weeks by 87 individual participants on a Facebook discussion thread regarding the environmental impacts of electric cars. Exploration of the Facebook group revealed that it could be classified as an online community, whose members assemble to share information and even collectively create new knowledge through peer-to-peer interactions. The data analysis reveals that the pace of the discussion was high first, and many participants engaged in the discussion but declined dramatically after the first week. Moreover, most of the interactions within the discussion thread seemed to include lower mental level functions like sharing and comparing of information and statements of disagreement. However, after expressing disagreement, in some cases, the participants were also able to reach higher mental levels, as they negotiated the meaning of terms and made new statements embodying a compromise. Therefore, I argue that the participant interactions enable the collective creation of knowledge also within informal online environments, while the process of collective creation of knowledge proceeds sequentially from lower mental levels to higher mental levels as the discussion goes further. The most significant contribution of this study is a deeper understanding of the process of knowledge co-creation through the informal interactions within the online community. The study concludes that knowledge creation is a social process that requires more than individual-level participation, as corroborating examples and identified disagreement enable the construction of new knowledge. Based on the findings, I present some practical implications for the online community to improve the quality of discussion and gained satisfaction, as well as suggestions for further research.

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Thesis advisor

Moisander, Johanna

Keywords

knowledge, knowledge co-creation, online community, qualitative content analysis

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