Lev-On, Azi, and Steinfeld, Nili. 2014. Starting a conversation: The role of managers in facilitating discussion in communities of practice. In Electronic Participation 2014: Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8564, eds. Efthimios Tambouris, Ann Macintosh and Frank Bannister, pp. 38-51. Berlin: Springer.
Online communities of practice are becoming significant discursive arenas in many organizations. Much literature about online communities depicts them as peer-based environments based on user-generated content, where community members take a central role in starting conversations. The current study shifts the focus from community members into managers, and asks who starts conversations in communities of practice, and if there are differences be-tween discussions opened by managers and by community members in terms of scope, topics of discussion, engagement and level of participation. Findings demonstrate the importance of managers in starting conversations and setting the discursive environment of communities of practice.
