There is increasing interest in topics at the nexus of collaboration and information behavior. A variety of studies conducted in organizational settings have provided us with key insights about the collaborative aspects of seeking, retrieving, and using information. Researchers have used a range of terms, including collaborative information seeking (CIS), collaborative information retrieval (CIR), collaborative search, collaborative sensemaking, and others to describe various pertinent activities. Consequently, we lack conceptual clarity concerning these activities, leading to a tendency to use terms interchangeably when in fact they may be referring to different issues. Here, we offer collaborative information behavior (CIB) as an umbrella term to connote the collaborative aspects of information seeking, retrieval, and use. We provide the contours of a model of CIB synthesized from findings of past studies conducted by our research team as well as other researchers. By reanalyzing and synthesizing the data from those studies, we conceptualize CIB as comprised of a set of constitutive activities, organized into three broad phases—problem formulation, collaborative information seeking, and information use. Some of the activities are specific to a particular phase, whereas others are common to all phases. We explain how those constitutive activities are related to one another. Finally, we discuss the limitations of our model as well as its potential usefulness in advancing CIB research.

Prior research has examined how organizational identity can enable and constrain innovations. A complementary literature has examined organizational ideology as the basis for actions driving identity-enhancing innovations. We examine how organizational ideology can serve as the basis for identity-challenging innovations through an in-depth study of the emergence of two innovations at Google-Gmail and AdSense. Findings from this study highlight a process-based ideology of participative experimentation. We explicate the constituent elements of this process-based ideology, and discuss its implications for research on innovation and identity.3

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Organizational accountability is considered critical to organizations’ sustained performance and survival. Prior research examines the structural and rhetorical responses that organizations use to manage accountability pressures from different constituents. With the emergence of social media, accountability pressures shift from the relatively clear and well-specified demands of identifiable stakeholders to the unclear and unspecified concerns of a pseudonymous crowd. This is further exacerbated by the public visibility of social media, materializing as a stream of online commentary for a distributed audience. In such conditions, the established structural and rhetorical responses of organizations become less effective for addressing accountability pressures. We conducted a multisite comparative study to examine how organizations in two service sectors (emergency response and hospitality) respond to accountability pressures manifesting as social media commentary on two platforms (Twitter and TripAdvisor). We find organizations responding online to social media commentary while also enacting changes to their practices that recalibrate risk, redeploy resources, and redefine service. These changes produce a diffractive reactivity that reconfigures the meanings, activities, relations, and outcomes of service work as well as the boundaries of organizational accountability. We synthesize these findings in a model of crowd-based accountability and discuss the contributions of this study to research on accountability and organizing in the social media era.

Prior research has examined how organizational identity can enable and constrain innovations. A complementaryliterature has examined organizational ideology as the basis for actions driving identity-enhancing innovations.We examine how organizational ideology can serve as the basis for identity-challenging innovations throughan in-depth study of the emergence of two innovations at Google—Gmail and AdSense. Findings from thisstudy highlight a process-based ideology of participative experimentation. We explicate the constituentelements of this process-based ideology, and discuss its implications for research on innovation and identity.