PhD defence M. (Martina) Pocchiari

Dissertation in short:

Shared-interest communities are social groups of people who gather around a common interest. These communities provide people with a centralized source of information about their common interest. They are important hubs of knowledge, social support, socialization, and entertainment for consumers, brands, and institutions alike. For this reason, every day, millions of people resort to their shared-interest communities – both online and in-person – to meet, discuss, solve problems, and even manage disruptive situations of crisis or emergency, such as terrorist attacks, natural or civil disasters, financial instability, as well as product recalls and service failures. Given their importance of consumers, businesses, institutions, and citizens, several streams of literature across business and economics has investigated the antecedents of community participation, success, and resilience. In the course of this investigation, both scientific evidence and industry events demonstrated that the complex environment of institutions, businesses, and technologies, and the daily dynamics of shared-interest communities are inevitably interconnected. However, it is still unclear how the emergence of new technologies and the occurrence of (often disruptive) external events relate to the success and sustainability of shared-interest communities.

With three essays, in this dissertation, I shed light into the dynamics of sharedinterest communities under the influence of changing technologies and potentially disruptive external events. In particular, I investigate three main questions:

1. What is the impact of digitizing community activities on the participation intentions of community members?;
2. What is the effect of a negative vs. positive shock to the shared purpose of an online community on members’ engagement and social cohesion in the affected community?;
3. What is the effect of a brand crisis on the engagement and social network resilience of consumers in brand communities?