The effect of social embeddedness on bloggers’ creativity
| Date | 29 April 2014 |
| Published date | 29 April 2014 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-06-2013-0144 |
| Pages | 399-416 |
| Author | Hsiu-Hua Cheng |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval |
The effect of social
embeddedness on
bloggers’ creativity
Hsiu-Hua Cheng
Department of Information Management,
Chaoyang University of Technology, Taichung, Taiwan
Abstract
Purpose – Blogs provide opportunities for bloggers to create. This creativity can attract audiences
and generate commercial success for blog service providers (BSPs). Thus to obtain competitive
advantage, such providers should stimulate their bloggers to produce creative content. The purpose
of this paper is to adopt social embeddedness and creativity theory to explore factors influencing
blogger creativity.
Design/methodology/approach – An online questionnaire and an online embeddedness system are
used to collectdata from 353 bloggers, including data on their motivation, integrationability, structural
and relational embeddedness and creativity. Hierarchical regression is applied for statistical analysis.
Findings – Analytical results show that structural embeddedness and relational embeddedness affect
blogger creativity. Additionally motivation negatively moderates the relationship between structural
embeddedness and creativity, and integration ability negatively moderates the relationship between
relational embeddedness and creativity.
Research limitations/implications – This study applies social embeddedness to elucidate the
relationships among quantity and quality of professional knowledge and creativity. This study also
discusses the moderating effect of motivation andinteg ration abilityon the relationship between social
embeddedness and creativity.
Practical implications – Creative articles by bloggers can popularise a blog platform, as they can
retain bloggers and attract new bloggers. Therefore, for BSPs enhancing the creative performance of
bloggers is one way to obtain competitive advantage.
Originality/value – The study contributes to knowledge of social embeddedness and creativity on
blog web sites, and importantly, this study develops a model that explains how antecedents influence
blogger creativity.
Keywords Blog, Creativity, Motivation, Social embeddedness, Integration ability
Paper type Research p aper
Introduction
Blogs have significantly affected the way in which people use media and acquire
information. Blogs are not merely a communication tool (Papadopoulos et al., 2012);
blogs also satisfy a need to create (Ip and Wagner, 2008). Thus blogs have become
a trendy creative space. Many bloggers are original producers of digital content, i.e.
many imaginative thoughts are expressed and disseminated on blogs.
One significant reason accounting for the attractiveness of blogs is that few
professional skills are needed to write and create on them (Ip and Wagner, 2008). Bloggers
can publish and thereby share their personal stories, opinions, knowledge, expertise and
product reviews (Qi, 2011). Writing and creativity have garnered considerable popularity
for the blog platform, retaining bloggers and attracting new bloggers. For blog service
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
Received 19 June 2013
First revision approved
23 September 2013
Online Information Review
Vol.38 No.3, 2014
pp. 399-416
rEmeraldGroup Publishing Limited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-06-2013-0144
This work was supported by the National Science Council (NSC99-2410-H-324-015-MY2)
of Taiwan.
399
Effect of social
embeddedness
providers (BSPs), assisting bloggers in creating is necessary because creativity is a key in
securing competitive advantage for BSPs. Thus investigating the antecedents of blogger
creativity is important.
Recent studies have explored various blog issues including knowledge/information
sharing (Papadopoulos et al., 2012), switching behaviour (Zhang et al., 2012), intention
to stay with a blogging community/usage intention (Lu and Hsiao, 2009; Shen and
Chiou, 2009; Wang and Lin, 2011) and blog stickiness (Lu and Lee, 2010). Notably blogs
have become a space for displaying creativity. Few studies have examined the
antecedents of blogger creativity. This study attempts to enhance the notion of creativity
as it applies to blogs.
Social relationships on blogs are always at the forefront. That is, without
interpersonal interactions, blogs would have not gained their widespread popularity.
Blogs have permalinks, which are URLs that link to a blog post, and comments and
trackback functions that can notify authors when someone links to one of their articles,
strengthening interactions between individuals and society. Therefore blog studies
consider social interaction important (Nakajima et al., 2005; Wood et al., 2006).
Ideas are typically formed through interaction between people in environments that
conditions that favour knowledge creation (Popadiuk and Choo, 2006). Social network
theory, which focuses on interpersonal interaction and communication (Granovetter, 1973;
Levin and Cross, 2004), addresses the human network a person constructs from their
history of communication with others. Social network theory is applied to understand
a person’s position within a network (Freeman, 1979). Differentnetwork positi onsand t ies
affect the speed at which an individual acquires information, the diversity of information
and the importance of information.These factors are determinants of a person’s creativity
(Burt, 1992).
Many scholars have applied a social network perspective to investigate blogs.
Furukawa et al. (2007) adopted a community perspective to explore the social network
structure of blogs using blogrolls, permalinks, and trac kback functions and discuss
community interaction among blogs. Ali-Hasan and Adamic (2007) demonstrated that blogs
construct special social networks via links and the trackback and comment functionalities.
To investigate blogger creativity this study applies a social network perspective.
Literature
Blog
Blogs can be considered online diaries of thoughts and opinions that are shared with
others who post replies and links (Wood et al., 2006). Highly popular blogs are massively
linked and read, such that a blogger’s reputation is determined by the extent to which
their blog is linked to other blogs (Neumann, 2005). Nakajima et al. (2005) argued that
links between blogs generate various interactions, i.e. others can post comments on
a focus blog (i.e. one at the centre of a network) or use a trackbac k function to link
to a focus blog. Lin et al. (2006) noted that links on blogs can accelerate the distribution of
content. As the number of links to a blog increases, the likelihood that it will be viewed by
other bloggers and internet users increases. Nakajima et al. (2005) took a similar position,
arguing that blogs spread information via comment and trackback functions.
Creativity
Creativity can be defined as new and useful thoughts or outputs (Amabile, 1996).
According to Heap (1989) creativity is the synthesis of ideas and concepts through
the radical restructuring and re-association of existing thoughts.
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