Theme 3: Reflection

I’ve always seen theory as a rather ”fuzzy” concept, knowing that it’s closely related to knowledge and ways of ”leading” it, but not really seeing the details. It was interesting to see it being structured like the subjects theories themselves aim to structure.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to attend the seminars the latest weeks, or dedicate that much time to reflection of the topic of theory. But as I finished reading the article of my choice and started to answer the questions, I thought about the fact that many articles use theory to structure theory. Since theory is more or less about structuring knowledge, this means that articles structure structures. And since the theories on the ”lowest” level most likely also structure theories in some way not mentioned explicitly in the texts, this should mean that theories more or less form a long chain of structures structuring structures etc... It made me wonder how ”long”, so to say, this chain is on average in todays academic circles. How deeps is the rabbit hole? (Or if you will, the rabbit’s chain of structure) 

Theme 3: Research and theory

The journal I’ve chosen is ”Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication”. It’s been published quarterly on the web since 1995 and covers a wide spectrum of topics related to communication-technology in one way or another. The latest published articles indicate an inclination towards the behavioral/social aspect of communication rather than the technological. 

Theory is a way of structuring explanations of relations and connections between entities, or lack of said relations and connections. As there is a wide variety of knowledge, the structures can take many different forms. A theory is empirically proven and can sometimes be used to predict outcomes of events/experiments, or used as guidelines to create certain results.

Information/data itself isn’t theory on it’s own, as it needs to have a context and an interpretation. Just like a word coming out our mouth has different meaning in different languages, contexts etc., bits of information mean different things when paired in different ways.

For the I’ve chosen the article ”Location, Motivation, and Social Capitalization via Enterprise Social Networking” by Leonardi, P. M., Huysman, M. and Steinfield, C. (2013). The authors discuss how enterprise social networking systems can help reduce three challenges in sharing organizational knowledge. The challenges include location of expertise, motivation to share knowledge and social capitalization in the form of developing and maintaining social ties with knowledge providers to actualize knowledge sharing. A theory for each challenge is presented along with a motivation and a comparison of each theory to conventional knowledge management systems. The main goal of this article is to present a foundation, or as the authors themselves put it: a springboard, composed of the three theories for further conceptual development in this field.

As for the choice and relevance of theories it’s hard for me to argue whether they’re the ideal ones (i.e., if there are other theories which are more suited), as the authors discuss  said theories as suitable replacements for previous systems and not comparisons between different new theories. The authors do acknowledge this at the end and propose literature which may interest readers curious in further research of this subject.

When it comes to the types of theory used in the article overall, I’d say mainly analysis with a hint of prediction in the discussion at the end of the article. Seeing as it’s main goal is to set a solid foundation for future research and not a final solution for a problem, it seems like a suitable choice for the purpose.

The way I see it, the pro’s of using this theory is that the reader gets a better understanding of why and how things are the way they are, as he/she gets a direct view of the previous system models and what advantages the discussed theories (the three analyzed theories that is) bring in comparison to the old ones.