IT Artifacts and Online Communities: The Role of Technology as Institutional Carriers

The pervasiveness of the Internet and social media has fostered the spread of online communities, collectives which have been interchangeably called virtual communities in the scholarly literature. In spite of the diffusion of Internet-mediated collectives, research on the domain has not yet paid enough attention to how institutional environments influence virtual interactions in general and online governance structures in particular. Contributing to reduce this gap, this research investigates how institutions influence the governance structures of a group of online communities, particularly focusing on the role of IT artifacts as carriers of institutional features to virtual environments. This study argues that taking into account institutional contexts is important to understand how online communities are created and evolve; and that research on online collectives should take into consideration the kind of tools that intermediate communication in order to have a better understanding of their governance structures.