Author(s)

L. Giuliano & G. La Rocca

Abstract

The process of sensemaking is central because it represents the primary site where meanings materialize that inform and constrain identity and action. The sensemaking concept came from organization science (Weick [12]), nevertheless we use it to look at the virtual communities as an organization context. Therefore, we can consider the mailing list as a virtual community in which people speak about teleworking, in order to construct their identity around this specific topic. In this case analysis of Italian mailing lists with telework as a subject provides a rich primary source for the research, because a group’s discussion, conducted through email messages during the research, is useful for making a retrospective analysis of the sensemaking process for the teleworkers and the tele and ework experts. The purpose of this paper is to apply the concepts of sensemaking in the virtual community in order to find the process of construct identity in people’s worlds. We use a text mining analysis to extract previous patterns and relationships buried in the large collection of text information. Keywords: virtual community, sensemaking, telework, automatic content analysis, text mining. 1 Introduction The growth in interactive communities and multimedia nets seems to be uncontrollable to such an extent that today one cannot figure both human and global communication without the Internet [1]. By now Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) has overcome the confined borders of the small circles

Keywords

virtual community, sensemaking, telework, automatic content analysis, text mining.