This paper addresses the invisible college concept with the intent of developing a consensus regarding its definition. Emphasis is placed on the term as it was defined and used in Derek de Solla Price’s (1963; 1986) work and reviewed on the basis of its thematic progress in past research over the years. Special attention is given to Lievrouw’s (1990) article concerning the structure versus social process problem to show that both conditions are essential to the invisible college and both may be reconciled. A new definition of the invisible college is also introduced, including a proposed research model. With this model, researchers are encouraged to study the invisible college by focusing on three critical components – the subject specialty, the scientists as social actors, and the Information Use Environment (IUE).

The paper should be of interest to academics, trade unionists, employers and governmental officials who have an interest in new forms of Web communication technology and how new Web communication technologies may affect the future direction of industrial relations. The main foci of the paper is Web 2.0, or the recent transformation of the World-Wide-Web to allow ordinary people to get involved in creating on-line content (e.g. blogs, wikis and social networking platforms), and, increasing evidence that non-organized workers are applying this new wave of communication technologies for work and employment-related ends. It is put forward that non-organized workers are progressively making more use of such technology as a means to develop their careers, take action against employers, and, as a mean to misbehave and survive work. The method applied to assess the proposed trends involves reviewing scholarly research, anecdotal accounts of worker activity from newspapers, and observations of Internet activity noted by the author of the paper. The conclusions suggest there is superficial, yet strong evidence to suggest workers are increasingly experimenting and being highly creative with Web 2.0 communication technology, for a range of work and employment-related ends. Due to the newness of the technology, however, the results generate far more unknowns than answers. Guidance for future research activities are summarised in the conclusions.

Community has traditionally been anchored in local, neighborhood interactions and enshrined as a code word for social cohesion. “Community ” usually connotes people socially and cognitively encapsulated by homogeneous, broadly embracing groups (Hillery, 1955; Wellman, 2001a; Wellman, 2002; Wellman & Leighton, 1979). People in group-based societies deal principally with fellow members of the few groups to which they belong: at home, in school, in the neighborhood, at work or in voluntary organizations. They work in a discrete work group within a single organization; they live in a household in a neighborhood; they are members of one or two kinship groups; and they participate in structured voluntary organizations: churches, bowling leagues, unions, and the like. There have been fears since the Industrial Revolution that traditional group-based community has been “lost”. From the early 1960s, the balance of analysis swung away from bewailing this purported loss of community to using ethnographic and survey techniques to discover the persistence of neighborhood communities. In the 1970s, analysts began realizing

The AIS/ISWorld Mailing List is the premier global communication tool for academics in the information systems area. This paper employs content analysis of archival data to report on an exploratory study of the usage of ISWorld over a four-year period between 2002 and 2006. We develop a coding scheme based on two theoretically distinct levels of communication and examine how ISWorld community members use the mailing list for the purposes of information dissemination, knowledge exchange, and knowledge creation. Our analysis yields important insights regarding the evolution of the ISWorld Mailing List, user characteristics and communication patterns, as well as the alignment between the community’s stated organizational goals and the design of the communication tool. Our findings show that the ISWorld Mailing List offers a highly efficient communication tool for knowledge dissemination to the IS community but also that its usage has been shifting more strongly towards information broadcasting and away from interactive knowledge exchange and creation. The paper concludes with some design and governance related