Virtual social contagion in online support communities

IF 5.7 2区管理学 Q1 INFORMATION SCIENCE & LIBRARY SCIENCE

Information and Organization Pub Date : 2025-03-10 DOI:10.1016/j.infoandorg.2025.100561

Ghiyoung Im , Eun Hee Park , Veda C. Storey , Richard L. Baskerville

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Firm-sponsored online support communities are ideal places for consumers to solve problems related to product failure after their purchases. Community participants post questions and answers and, inevitably, are influenced by other participants' thoughts, emotions, and intentions. This study seeks to identify the patterns of social contagion and their development processes in online support communities and their impact on consumer post-purchase outcomes. Research on online support communities has emphasized the importance of either cognition or emotion when explaining contagious behaviors but has not explored both elements simultaneously. In this research, data was collected from two online technology support forums managed by two large IT companies. Netnography was employed for data collection and analysis. The data analysis leads to the development of a virtual social contagion typology (i.e., mechanical, smart, mob, and passion contagion) and its associated process models. The contribution of this research is to identify the simultaneous roles of cognitive and emotional activities in the development of social contagion. It also shows that contagion in online support communities is dynamic over time, and significantly affected by emotion.

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来源期刊

Information and Organization Multiple-

CiteScore

11.20

自引率

1.60%

发文量

期刊介绍： Advances in information and communication technologies are associated with a wide and increasing range of social consequences, which are experienced by individuals, work groups, organizations, interorganizational networks, and societies at large. Information technologies are implicated in all industries and in public as well as private enterprises. Understanding the relationships between information technologies and social organization is an increasingly important and urgent social and scholarly concern in many disciplinary fields.Information and Organization seeks to publish original scholarly articles on the relationships between information technologies and social organization. It seeks a scholarly understanding that is based on empirical research and relevant theory.