Abstract

This talk consists of three parts:
Part I: The power of organizing without organizations. We will talk about how social media technologies are redefining the boundaries of organizations by reducing communication costs and forging connections among millions of Internet users. I will present my research on Wikipedia projects and discuss its practical implications on managing work groups in organizations.

Part II: Building vibrant online communities. Although many businesses have created Facebook groups or showed up on Twitter or other social media platforms, many fail to attract enough fans or build a vibrant community to engage customers. I will present my research on using social science theories on group identity and interpersonal bonds to inform the design of online groups.

Part III: Managing the new workforces. Social media technologies have greatly expanded the venues through which an organization can get its work done. What should managers know about the pros and cons of outsourcing work to the crowd? I will present research on task and incentive design to improve performance in online marketplaces for work such as Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor of Information and Decision Sciences in the Carlson School of Management. My research examines how we can design and manage information technologies to support effective group interactions and collaboration. My recent projects focus on online community design, business applications of web 2.0, and geographically distributed collaboration. My work has been published in Management Science, Organization Science, Journal of MIS, Organization Studies, and the Proceedings of AOM, ICIS, and HICSS.