Information sharing and timing: findings from two finnish organizations

  • Authors:

  • Gunilla Widén-Wulff;Elisabeth Davenport

  • Affiliations:

  • Information Studies, Åbo Akademi University, Åbo, Finland;School of Computing, Napier University, Edinburgh, Scotland

  • Venue:
  • CoLIS'05 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Context: conceptions of Library and Information Sciences
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Timing of organizational information sharing is an under-explored area of research in information science. Timing has been addressed on the individual level in the context of sense-making, or in terms of moves in information seeking. In related areas, time has been treated, largely, in terms of life cycle theories, which then again does not feature information sharing. In this paper we have drawn on a broader range of source materials to investigate timing and information sharing in two very different social environments: an insurance claims department and a biotechnology firm. The key question is “how does timing work in the contexts where information sharing happens?” The study shows that sharing cannot be considered without taking timing into account. The cases reveal that organisational timing depends on the demands of social process as well as on individual disposition. Topic Areas: Contextual factors, Information seeking and behaviour.