Microsoft Word 2007 ichrie conference Proceedings Final-Final 06-06-07. doc

 
INTRODUCTION 
The importance of communities of practice for the development and sustainability of tourism enterprises 
has been strongly emphasized in tourism literature (Cooper, 2006). Tourism practitioners, in contrast to those in 
other management sectors, are confronted with vast array of complex aims and intermingled issues. In order to 
manage this complexity and devise effective strategies, they must have access to wide variety of knowledge at their 
disposal (Wöber, 2003). Recognizing this need, tourism researchers and practitioners created systems that enable 
tourism managers and organizations to effectively develop, share, and use up-to-date knowledge of the tourism 
industry. Some of the important examples in this genre include Illinois Tourism Networks (Gretzel & Fesenmaier, 
2004), TourMIS (Wöber, 2003), and Canadian Tourism Exchange (Waksberg, Stevens & Wales, 2000) that have 
been deployed with reasonable successes. In addition, researchers such as Wang & Fesenmaier (2003) and Buhalis 
(1998) had emphasized on the importance of tourist online communities and their relevance to the tourism industry 
for enabling information and knowledge sharing among individuals.
However, the authors argue that the while the technical and system development aspects are important in 
such initiatives, “softer” aspects such as social influences and cognitions of individuals in knowledge sharing within 
online communities also deserve closer investigation. This stream of socio-technical research is particularly 
important to understand certain interesting but unanswered questions: Why do people, especially busy tourism 
professionals, take time out of their schedules to participate in such online communities? If they participate, what are 
the factors that determine and facilitate whether tourism managers share their knowledge with others in an online 
environment? One important distinction between regular face-to-face communities and online communities is the 
“online” characteristics of human interactions. In an online environment, participations are often voluntary and 
open. Neither the promoters nor the participants have a complete control over who should actively share and 
contribute knowledge to the communities. Extant research suggests that participation and knowledge sharing is 
strongly influenced by prior personal relationships (Krackhardt, 1992), social sanctions and norms (Pelled, 1996), or 
even a simple requirement of recognition and control (Wang and Fesenmaier, 2003).
Building upon these social considerations, this study investigated the determinants of knowledge sharing 
intention in an online community of practice to provide empirical contributions. The theoretical model in this study 

---