The Research Of How Social Capital Influence Knowledge Sharing In Virtual Community Under The Context Of Web2.0

As the popularity of the Internet, especially the rapid development of Web2.0network applications, netizen are playing the role of both consumers and producers intheir network life. The virtual communities are composed of people who have thesame interest and professional background, and sharing knowledge or information isbecoming an important part of people’s network life in these communities. In theabsence of economic incentives and behavioral constraints, why people incommunities share their knowledge to help others solve the problem initiatively? Thisdoubt has becoming a hotspot for scholars in recent years. Based on differentpurposes and research perspective, such as sociology, psychology and praxiology,scholars have studied the factors of knowledge sharing behavior in virtualcommunities and gave valuable proposals for the development of virtualcommunities.This article is based on the theory of social capital, and takes trust as the coreelement of social capital. Under the context of Web2.0, everyone is a contentproducer and there is no rights center in virtual community. So the social capital isdivided into dimensions of relational capital and structural capital. Integratingindividual level factors and community level factors, this article study factorsinfluencing knowledge sharing behaviors in virtual communities. Through thequestionnaire survey and structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis, this articlefind that there is a direct positive effect of altruism, trust, identity, reciprocity andreward system on the knowledge sharing behavior. Moreover, self-efficacy,expectation and openness show an indirect positive effect on virtual communityknowledge sharing behavior through social capital relationship dimension. There isno distinct relation found between common language and knowledge sharingbehavior.According to the empirical findings, this article proposes what factors should becontain in a “Ba” of virtual community to promote knowledge sharing behavior. On this basis, a user-sharing-behavior-based virtual community model has been proposed,to provide some guidance on the construction of virtual communities.