Digital Skill Evolution in an Industrial Relationship: Professional Figure in Online Communities

Digital Skill Evolution in an Industrial Relationship: Professional Figure in Online Communities

Lucia Aiello
Copyright: © 2019 |Pages: 15
DOI: 10.4018/IJRDIS.2019010101
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Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a powerful mechanism for doing online work and allows for collaboration. By now, in the media and in business on the Internet, crowdsourcing is recognized as an innovative form of value creation that needs taken seriously. This article provides a framework to propose the relation between crowds and tutorship; it considers the tutor of a crowd as a strategic professional figure in an online community. This is done by the consideration of the different roles, activities and tasks of a tutor through the field analysis of a platform of one company that uses crowdsourcing. This tutor is examined based on the middle-of-the-road theoretical positioned from Porter and Kramer, the value creation, and Suermann and Franzoni, the crows science user contribution patterns. The recently evolution of crowd platforms considers the interaction between companies and crowds based on a “Community of Practice” model of Zucchermaglio and Talamo. Value analysis also considers the differences in roles and tasks in relation to where crowd activity is placed into the value chain of company. In crowdsourcing, “digital people” live in a digital society where every individual has a role and operates in an online community, and those have force points and weakness points. The tutor cans also monitor these points, and push interaction and activities of the crowd. The main theoretical contribution is the looking gap in literature and contributing work to this. Through a qualitative analysis, this article provides evidence of the main activities and the role of digital tutors in an online community. The method utilized is netnography through an online participation and observation of a researcher. In this work, professional figures and new technologies are weighed, and human resource management must consider this as it creates value. This article concludes that a tutor of crowds has a positive behavior, they can stimulate crowds. These positive and active behaviors effect crowd attitudes about the benefits of the community, their expectations, and opinions all of which are fundamental for the growth of online community.
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Introduction

Over the past few years, digital revolution and digital disorder have been widely addressed in academic literature. Still, these contributions nevertheless, there is a gap in literature on topic professional figure required in online community.

Different managers are not find a reference that would help them to orientate and fully exploit new digital opportunities. This is partly due to the still limited collaboration between the two communities: academics and practitioners. Particularly, the evolution of professional figures and them role.

Scholars are supposed to focus on developing abstract models and theoretical representations of the digital figure professionals and those digital roles in digital platform. Conversely, managers seem to be primarily concerned with obtaining digital solutions, and they not considered the impact of digital revolutions on roles and activities of human resource. This contribute attempts to blend the new perspectives and explore new, fresh areas that are highly relevant for researchers and practitioners alike; it starts from online community’s analysis (King, Storm, 1996).

Butler, Sproull, Kiesler and Kraut (2002) showed the community effort online groups; the authors investigated on who does the work and why in online community. Digital infrastructure allows a public space for the group the authors consider that “… an online group is a role that is formally named and characterized by distinctive rights and responsibilities. The role is defined and reinforced through community structure and rules…” (2002, p. 175).

This original contribution covers a wide range of topic through an experience of Italian digital platform and gives an interesting perspective on the definition of a new professional figure of online community: tutor of crowd. The needed customer journey and the various challenges that this process is facing. Confronted with the various factors related to this unavoidable and ongoing change, a resilient manager should be able to recognize and seize all opportunities that every epochal disruption ultimately presents to existing organizations.

Moreover, in literature there is a gap on topic considered: professional figure require in online community and them roles and activities. Thus, greatest contribution to this theme is on eLearning, the skills of the online tutor (Duggleby, 2001) through nethnography, thus ethnographies of online communities (Hine, 2017).

The chapter positioned into a literature review that is how topic the online professional figure in value creation perspective in digital platform. The motif is a gap detected into literature on digital people topic. The principal theoretical contribute is a put in evidence the different perspective, role and approach of professional figure in digital context. There is not a study on balancing between professional figure and digital context. Through qualitative analysis the paper put in evidence the main activities and role of digital tutor in online community how digital platform (Nonnecke, Andrews, & Preece, 2006).

In the context of organizational studies, it is increasingly important to consider virtual environments in the same way as physical ones so that the inputs in terms of performance are better addressed and more effective. This study really wants to contribute to this purpose, because it considers not the power of digital as a solution or product but as an ambient in which people - digital people - operate. Understanding how digital people work and what skills and tasks they need to perform means implementing the process on the table particularly, in terms of performance and efficiency.

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