Chun Wei Choo

• PhD
• Professor at University of Toronto

This research develops and tests a model of individual intentions to actively seek information about climate change. Our premise is that the individual's intention to actively seek information about climate change would determine their knowledge of and attitudes towards climate change, and this would in turn influence how they act or change their b...

Recent examples of organizational wrongdoing such as those that led to the opioid crisis and the 2008 financial meltdown show that organizations can deliberately use information to deceive others, resulting in serious harm. This brief communication explores the role of information in organizational wrongdoing. We analyze a dataset consisting of 80...

Research on organizational epistemic vice alleges that some organizations are epistemically malevolent, i.e. they habitually harm others by deceiving them. Yet, there is a lack of empirical research on epistemic malevolence. We connect the discussion of epistemic malevolence to the empirical literature on organizational deception. The existing empi...

This article analyses the manner in which mobile health applications contribute to the empowerment of patients. The theoretical background included m-health, user empowerment and value co-creation. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to investigate the representative case study of the Kangaroo application, a free app designed by a health...

Purpose This study aims to investigate how the processes of memory acquisition, retention, retrieval and application occur in project-based organizations (PBOs). In this kind of organization, the nature of corporate memory is influenced by the transience, uniqueness and independence of the project portfolio. Such understanding may help practitioner...

Purpose - In scholarly publications, citations play an essential epistemic role in creating and disseminating knowledge. Conversely, the use of problematic citations impedes the growth of knowledge, contaminates the knowledge base and disserves science. This study investigates the presence of problematic citations in the works of business ethics sc...

Office work is increasingly collaborative in the 21st century. ‘Information culture' is a broad set of values and behavioural workplace norms pertaining to information management and use. To investigate whether information culture influences use of collaborative information tools, conceptualization and measurement instruments are presented for info...

Purpose This paper aims to propose an integrative and result-driven health-care knowledge management (HKM) model and discuss the findings of a research that examines how the KM initiatives of a major private Brazilian hospital system are linked to its health-care performance outcomes. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from a top-leve...

This paper analyzes how mobile health applications contribute to the empowerment of health service users. The theoretical foundation includes m‐health, user empowerment, and value co‐creation. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to investigate the Kangaroo application (Canguru, in Portuguese), which targets Brazilian pregnant women and s...

This study empirically tests the impact of the Dark Triad personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) and co-worker competitiveness on knowledge sabotage. A model was constructed and tested by means of Partial Least Squares with data from 150 participants recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk. The individual personality traits...

The purpose of this paper is to revitalize the theory and practice of the Information Audit (IA) by connecting it with recent developments in information management theories and methods While the IA is a powerful information management practice, the methods and applications of IA have not been wedded to recent developments in the study of informati...

Monograph examines how an organization’s knowledge acquisition and information seeking would lead to the construction of beliefs and the formation of epistemic practices that can affect its capacity to learn and grow. The book explores the epistemology of organizational learning and information seeking; how organizations acquire and justify knowled...

This study examines early warning from the users' perspective as a special category of information seeking. Specifically, we look at the 2009 Victorian bushfires in Australia as an instructive case of early warning information seeking. The bushfires, the worst in Australia's recorded history, were unique in its ferocity and damage caused, but also...

From the 1994 CAIS Conference: The Information Industry in Transition McGill University, Montreal, Quebec. May 25 - 27, 1994.CEOs scan the external environment for information about events and trends in order to plan the organization's future courses of action. This study investigates how CEOs in the Canadian telecommunications industry acquire and...

Résumé : Cet article présente comment une organisation à haute intensité de savoir mobilise et maximise ses capacités informationnelles et du savoir. Les résultats indiquent qu'en termes d'utilisation de l'information, de culture et de gestion, les répondants estiment pouvoir utiliser efficacement l'information pour réaliser leur travail, qu'il est...

The paper's purpose is to present the PMM (Portal Maturity Model) which can be used to assess the contributions of intranets and portals to Knowledge Management initiatives. The PMM was empirically tested in 62 organizations, and it is based on TAM, TTF, knowing organization model and KM maturity model. Résumé : L'objectif de cet article est de pré...

Purpose – By selectively reviewing theory‐driven survey studies on internet health information seeking, the paper aims to provide an informal assessment of the theoretical foundations and research methods that have been used to study this information behavior. Design/methodology/approach – After a review of the literature, four theory‐driven quant...

Enterprise online communities exist as vendor-hosted platforms to bridge customers, business partners, and employees to co-create values by supporting business objectives and client goals. Unfortunately, establishing online presence through the use of a community platform is no longer sustainable in this hyper-social world, as minimal competitive a...

Effective knowledge sharing within project teams is of critical importance to knowledge-intensive organizations. Prior research studies indicate a positive association between shared cognitive perspective and effective knowledge sharing behavior among co-workers. Building on these studies and drawing from theoretical foundations found in the sociol...

This paper investigates and analyses the concept of ba - or enabling context - in the fields of information science, management/business and information systems literature in order to understand its conceptual evolution, discussions, applications and expansion since its introduction in 1998 by Nonaka et al. (Nonaka and Konno, 1998; Nonaka et al., 2...

The US response to the 2010 Haiti Earthquake was a large effort coordinated by three major agencies that worked in tandem with the Government of Haiti, the United Nations, and many countries from around the globe. Managing this response effort was a ...

This paper investigates and analyses the concept of ba – or enabling context – in the fields of information science, information systems and management/business literature in order to understand its conceptual evolution, discussions, applications and expansion since its introduction in 1998 by Nonaka et al. The qualitative methodology is bibliograp...

Purpose This paper aims to examine how knowledge sharing behavior is influenced by three sets of dynamics: a rational calculus that weighs the costs and benefits of sharing; a dispositional preference that favors certain patterns of sharing outcomes; and a relational effect based on working relationships. Design/methodology/approach Concepts from...

Purpose Looking at the practical experience of organizations pursuing knowledge management, it is found that their efforts are primarily focused on creating the conditions and the context that will enable knowledge creation. This need for developing enabling conditions and contexts was identified more than a decade ago when Nonaka and associates in...

This introductory article explores how the use of information affects the effectiveness of early warning systems. By effectiveness, we refer to the capacity of the system to detect and decide on the existence of a threat. There are two aspects to effectiveness: (a) being able to see the evidence that is indicative of a threat and (b) making the dec...

This session combines individual presentations with a group discussion. The focus of this session and the expertise of this panel bring together ways of thinking about information seeking and use in diverse organizational contexts. Organizational contexts are not uniform. Quite the contrary, they are very diverse in terms of the individuals, cultur...

This research explores the link between information culture and information use in three organizations. We ask if there is a way to systematically identify information behaviors and values that can characterize the information culture of an organization, and whether this culture has an effect on information use outcomes. The primary method of data...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look at why organizational disasters happen, and to discuss how organizations can improve their ability to recognize and respond to warning events and conditions before they tailspin into catastrophe. Design/methodology/approach – A review of research on organizational disasters suggests that there are a n...

The paper’s purpose is to analyze the effects of technological and organizational features on intranet and portal usage. Technological features comprise common intranet functions such as collaboration, search engine, personalization, workflow and content management. Intranet organizational features were associated with intranet support team’s profi...

The paper intends to analyse the links between competence management and Knowledge Management (KM), adopting the Knowing Organisation Model as the main framework. A web-based survey was conducted with 168 KM leaders and HR managers from Brazilian and Portuguese middle and large size organisations. The results have given evidences that competence ma...

This short paper provides discussion on the influencing effect of information behavior in organizations, as well as the forces which influence information behavior itself. The research goal is to offer insight on the nature of information behavior in organizations. To do so, the authors present findings from their quantitative analysis of a Web-bas...

Keywords:medical informatics;biomedical information;medical science;information access;human factors;information resources management

Introduction. Organizations seek and use information to understand and enact their worlds. Information constitutes what the organization 'knows' about its environment and its tasks, and thus creates a basis for action. However, the link between information, knowledge, and action is problematic and not well understood. Method. We consider three cas...

http://www.igi-global.com/chapter/effects-enterprise-portals-knowledge-management/17885 In an attempt to consolidate various departmental intranets, organizations are constructing corporate intranets or portals(Choo, Detlor, & Turnbull, 2000). They are becoming single points of entry through which users and communities can perform their business t...

The paper presents a case study of a large Canadian law firm with a distinctive information culture that is vigorously implementing an information management strategy. Our findings suggest that, at least for this organization, information culture trumps information management in its impact on information use out- comes. Thus, the strongly held info...

Innovation and knowledge creation—these two concepts have a strong relationship but this relationship has not been examined systematically. This paper reviews the important theoretical work in both streams of research, highlighting the fundamental similarities and differences. Four major models of innovation are compared, and the distinction betwee...

This paper presents recent research findings on the effects of organizational knowledge management (KM) context on KM practices. Data were collected at a large Canadian law firm via a Web-based survey instrument from over 400 participants comprising professional and support staff working in various office locations. The purpose of the study was to...

The genesis and context of disasters and mishaps raise a set of topics that are of interest for Information Studies; namely, the contributions of information failures as precursors to, as opposed to outcomes of, disasters. There is much to be learned by relating the research in three key areas: disasters, information use environments and behaviours...

Although it is assumed that information about patient safety and adverse events will be used for improvement and organizational learning, we know little about how this actually happens in patient care settings. This study examines how organizational and professional practices and beliefs related to patient safety influence (1) how health care provi...

Merck's recent withdrawal of the arthritis drug Vioxx from the market and the warning signs leading up to the crisis are emblematic of how organizational disasters often incubate over long periods of time. The author asserts that organizational disasters can often be foreseen, but warning signs sometimes go unheeded for various reasons: Signals are...

This paper explores the dynamics of information- and knowledge-based activities in one of the worldâÄôs leading foreign exchange banks and its development of an innovative online trading system. These activities are analyzed using the framework of âÄúthe knowing organization,âÄù which postulates that learning and innovation in organizations result...

Patients with long-term chronic disease experience numerous illness patterns and disease trends over time, resulting in different sets of knowledge needs than patients who intermittently seek medical care for acute or short-term problems. Health-care organizations can promote knowledge creation and utilization by chronic patients through the introd...

Business organizations worldwide are implementing techniques and technologies to better manage their knowledge. Their objective is to improve the quality of the contributions people make to their organizations by helping them to make sense of the context within which the organization exists; to take responsibility, cooperate, and share what they kn...

The paper develops a behavioral model of Web information seeking that identifies four complementary modes of information seeking: undirected viewing, conditioned viewing, informal search, and formal search. In each mode of viewing or searching, users would adopt distinctive patterns of browser moves: starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, m...

This paper compares two influential attempts at presenting a comprehensive framework of knowledge management. For each perspective the author examines theoretical foundations, highlights conceptual elements and themes, and discusses the role of information and information management. Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi analyze the dynamics of know...

This paper presents preliminary results from a study of how women in information technology (IT) professions use a range of information sources in their day-to-day work activities. Through a questionnaire survey, the study investigates the effects of Perceived Source Accessibility and Perceived Source Quality on the selection and use of information...

This book adopts a knowledge-based perspective that sees the firm as a store of knowledge resources and capabilities. The firm’s knowledge base includes the expertise and experience of individuals, the routine and processes that define the distinctive way of doing things inside the organization, as well as the knowledge of customer needs and suppli...

This book adopts a knowledge-based perspective that sees the firm as a store of knowledge resources and capabilities. The firm’s knowledge base includes the expertise and experience of individuals, the routine and processes that define the distinctive way of doing things inside the organization, as well as the knowledge of customer needs and suppli...

This book adopts a knowledge-based perspective that sees the firm as a store of knowledge resources and capabilities. The firm’s knowledge base includes the expertise and experience of individuals, the routine and processes that define the distinctive way of doing things inside the organization, as well as the knowledge of customer needs and suppli...

This chapter introduces the perspective of strategy as the outcome of organizational sensemaking, knowledge creating, and decision making. In the first three sections, we examine the processes by which an organization constructs meaning, creates knowledge, and makes decisions that drive patterns of action. The ensuing sections show how the three pr...

Knowledge repositories are increasingly being viewed as a special form of knowledge management (KM) in organizational memory information systems (OMIS). Presented in this chapter is the prototype of a knowledge repository which is envisaged to be an electronic repository of online pedagogical resources and is designed and implemented as a web-based...

This article has no abstract

Environmental scanning is the acquisition and use of information about events, trends, and relationships in an organization's external environment, the knowledge of which would assist management in planning the organization's future course of action. Depending on the organization's beliefs about environmental analyzability and the extent that it in...

Examines the information processes that support organisational sense-making, knowledge creation and decision making. Sense-making involves interpreting the raw data of the environment by enactment, selection and retention. New knowledge is created by knowledge conversion, knowledge building, and knowledge linking. Completely rational decision makin...

In order to manage knowledge, we need to understand the nature of knowledge in organisations. It is helpful to distinguish between three categories of organisational knowledge: tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge, and cultural knowledge. Tacit knowledge is personal knowledge, explicit knowledge is codified knowledge, and cultural knowledge is based...

The research presented here suggests that people who use the Web as an information resource to support their daily work activities engage in a range of complementary modes of information seeking, varying from undirected viewing that does not pursue a specific information need, to formal searching that retrieves focused information for action or dec...

This paper investigates how knowledge workers utilize the Web to seek external information as part of their daily work. Thirty four participants from seven companies were interviewed about their information needs and preferences. In addition, a custom-developed software application recorded each participant's Web behavior for a two week monitoring...

We often see “information” described as a “resource.” This tends to imply that information is “something” that resides in documents, information systems, or other artifacts. The information is assumed to be constant, unchanging. Its meaning is fixed by its representation in the artifact. A complementary view is to look at information not as an obje...

This chapter has three objectives. First, we examine the transformation of data to knowledge as the outcome of human enactment that imposes increasing levels of structure on signals and data. Second, we present a typology of organizational knowledge that differentiates between tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge, and cultural knowledge. Third, we i...

Having examined the intranet as an IT infrastructure for knowledge work and the need for system designers to adopt an information behavioral/ecological approach to intranet design, we now turn our attention away from intranets and towards the broader utilization of the World Wide Web as an information seeking platform. Our focus in this section of...

In the previous section of this monograph, we illustrated and described two predominant themes. The first examined information seeking as a human activity consisting of primarily three social processes: the experiencing of information needs, the seeking of information, and the using of information. The second explored the nature of organizational k...

This chapter presents findings from a recent investigation by the authors of how knowledge workers in organizations utilize the Web to seek external information as part of their daily work (Choo, Detlor, & Turnbull, 2000). Though other studies of Web use presented in the last chapter cover a broad range of Web users, most Web usage studies tend to...

The last chapter presented an overview of the potential of intranets as an IT infrastructure to support knowledge work. As a means to foster the design of intranets for this purpose, we now operationalize some of the concepts discussed in the first section of this book on information needs and uses and the context and manner in which organizations...

Knowledge work consists of transforming data into information, information into knowledge, and then using this knowledge to take action and obtain results: Data → Information → Knowledge → Action → Results Near the beginning of the book we saw how the conversion of data into knowledge involved increasing the order and structure of information throu...

Knowledge repositories are increasingly being viewed as a special form of knowledge management (KM) in organizational memory information systems (OMIS). Presented in this chapter is the prototype of a knowledge repository which is envisaged to be an electronic repository of online pedagogical resources and is designed and implemented as a web-based...

The paper develops a new behavioral model of information seeking on the Web by combining theoretical elements from information science and organization science. The model was tested, in a preliminary way, during the first phase of a study of how managers and IT specialists use the Web to seek external information as part of their daily work. Partic...

Singapore's information technology (IT) initiatives evolved in three phases, each framed by a national plan that clearly articulated goals, policies, resources, and projects. The first phase, from 1981 to 1985, saw the start of the Civil Service Computerization Program and the establishment of the National Computer Board (NCB). The program's broad...

An organization uses information strategically in three areas: to make sense of change in its environment; to create new knowledge for innovation; and to make decisions about courses of action. These apparently distinct processes are in fact complementary pieces of a larger canvas, and the information behaviors analyzed in each approach interweave...

This article reports a study of the information sources used in environmental scanning by chief executives of the Canadian telecommunications industry. Environmental scanning is the acquisition and use of information about events and trends in a firm's external environment, the knowledge of which would assist management in planning the firm's futur...

Environmental scanning is the acquisition and use of information about events and trends in an organization's external environment, the knowledge of which would assist management in planning the organization's future courses of action. This paper reports a study of how 13 chief executives in the Canadian publishing and telecommunications industries...