wellman@chass.utoronto.ca:

Never thought I'd have to lecture social scientists, even those interested in the Internet. (...) It's pretty clear that you can have community within a company -- that's what much ofindustrial relations and communities of practice literature is about. But even with that, community doesn't become an identity with company. They are 2 analytically separate things.

I doubt that anyone would disagree -- sounds like there's a straw man here. The question, as I have heard it, has rather been as to the institutional locations of the practices through which "communities" come into being, where community is described as a particular form of sociability. An answer to that question is to say that, certainly, community-building practices can be mobilized by companies, and have been. What this has to do with positing an identity between "community" and "company", on the other hand, is somewhat mysterious. Perhaps the lecture can wait ;-). On the other hand, danah@media.mit.edu wrote:

Also, as Bram mentionned, by trying to bound community, companies are also trying to regulate identity (the Passport phenomenon). Through things like Passport, they can define _who_ belongs to what communities. I have a rant on how this fails to recognize that 1) people belong to multiple communities; 2) people share different facets with different communities;

... in which I'd replace "fails to recognize" with "fully recognizes and targets the fact that". As in, many corporate community-building strategies are *very* aware that people are members of different communities, etc., etc. -- but their goal is to change that. (Well, their *strategy* is to change that and realign people with their company, ie capture eyeballs, customers, etc.) Now, saying that isn't the same thing as dismissing all company-mediated involvement in community-building: I'm only talking about a specific kind of company-mediated community-building. It's the kind which tries to convert wins at certain layers into necessary affiliations at other layers. Vertical tying, in other words, of the type Felix talked about the other day. cheers Bram --