Sources of knowledge acquisition for Chinese software engineers

Dimitris Assimakopoulos and Jie Yan

mard, BP 127, 38003 Grenoble cx01, Grenoble Ecole de Management, Europole, 12 rue Pierre Se France. dimitris.assimakopoulos@grenoble-em.com, jie.yan@grenoble-em.com

This research adopts a triangulation strategy based on ethnographic case study and questionnaire survey shedding light on how Chinese software engineers acquire codied and tacit knowledge in their daily development work. Software engineers make effective use of complementary resources within a broad spectrum of choices for seeking advice, learning how to solve technical problems, and transferring knowledge to the local community of practice from far beyond the organizational boundary. The analysis focuses on patterns of advice seeking relations within and across project team boundaries, also highlighting the Internet software technology forums as an important channel for technical information sharing across organizational boundaries. The implications for R&D managers are also discussed with special reference to software development and other knowledge intensive computer related work in China.

1. Introduction

hina like other high growth emerging countries, such as India, saw a rapid boom of continuous innovation in the development of software in the past decade or so. Software development is widely acknowledged as a knowledge intensive industry characterized by complex system design, rapid update of technology-related knowledge, and strong competition for sustaining innovation. The production and management patterns in software industry are quite different from traditional business (Torrisi, 1998; Hoch et al., 1999). It is therefore timely to investigate how Chinese software professionals create and share knowledge within and across project and organizational boundaries. This research based on a doctoral research project carried out by the authors in the early 2000s focuses on the software engineers knowledge acquisition activities in their daily development work. In particular, by tracing the advice-seeking linkages within six software rms in Beijing, this research aims to get an understanding of how the Chinese engineers acquire and share technical

tacit knowledge important to their software development work. The knowledge-based theory of the rm traces competitive advantage of organizations back to their capability of transforming tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1967; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) into unique and valuable products and services (Grant, 1996; Teece, 1998, 2001). For key application areas, such as software, an increased understanding of the tacit nature of technical knowledge required for innovation has shifted the emphasis from information technologies (IT) itself to the role of tacit knowledge in the innovation process, and in particular, to the study of the environment in which tacit knowledge is created and shared within or across organizational boundaries and communities of practice (Davenport and Prusak, 1998; Brown and Duguid, 2001). The paper is divided into four additional sections. The main concepts, including the notions of tacit knowledge, community of practice, and external personal networks, are discussed in Section 2. Section 3 presents the research methodology. Section 4 analyzes the software engineers sources of knowledge acquisition, namely, books 97

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Dimitris Assimakopoulos and Jie Yan and online codied information, local community of practice, informal personal networks, and Internet-based software technology forums. Finally, in Section 5 we discuss the implications of the ndings for R&D managers. advantage it confers because competitors may nd it difcult, impossible even, to imitate or acquire it. One way to accumulate tacit knowledge is from time-consuming practice and problem-solving experience in a particular context, i.e., learning by doing (Arrow, 1962), in a community of practice. A community of practice (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998), as an informal organizational structure, is currently considered as one of the key concepts for understanding tacit knowledge creation and sharing within organizations. A community of practice refers to a group of people informally and contextually bounded in a work situation who apply a common competence and expertise in the pursuit of a common activity (Wenger, 1998). Members of a community of practice develop a shared mental model, a common language and behaviour with respect to a specic practice through common experiences and continuous ongoing interactions. A common understanding of the work in hand lowers the cost of communication and results in explicit and tacit rules of coordination and behaviour over time. Brown and Duguid (2001) point out that organizations composed of communities of practice with a certain degree of autonomy and legitimacy are more likely to be innovative, as different communities of practice enact new experiments which might be able to overcome organizational rigidities (Leonard-Barton, 1992) by means of constant adaptation to changing membership and circumstances. Across organizational boundaries, informal personal networks often serve as channels for valuable information and knowledge ow facilitating innovation across the rails of common practice (Johannisson, 1998; Powell, 1998; Assimakopoulos and Macdonald, 2003a, b). Almost three decades ago, Allen (1977) found that individual extra-organizational linkages of R&D units in industrial settings are very important performance enhancing factors. For example, in complex R&D projects, the role of gatekeepers was found to be essential (Allen et al., 1979). Rogers (1982) also highlighted that much information for innovation in high-technology ows by informal means, in personal networks, by means of information exchange among individuals. More recently Conway (1997) found that personal networks and linkages play a signicant role as link-pins, bridges, and liaisons in successful innovations. Overall, personal networks seem to empower high-technology rms to be more innovative and exible, thus generating and susr Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2006

2. Main concepts
Software is nothing but pure knowledge in codied form (Hoch et al., 1999, p. 7). However, development of software is heavily dependent on people, a continuous process of knowledge acquisition, transfer, processing, and integration into machine readable and executable code. The fuel for software development is not only stored in codied knowledge on various media: books, user guides, company documents, existing program codes, computer hard discs, development platforms and the like, but it is also stored as tacit knowledge (Polanyi, 1967; Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995) in human brains of software engineers, and their communities of practice (Brown and Duguid, 1991; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). Knowledge is generally classied into two categories: explicit and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge can be expressed in words, data, numbers, and language. It can be codied into documents and databases, and shared among individuals relatively easily. IT can be used to facilitate the transfer and exchange of explicit or codied knowledge. In contrast, tacit knowledge is personal, context-specic and hard to formalize and to communicate among people. It encompasses two dimensions: cognitive elements, including personal beliefs, values and mental models, and technical elements including technical skills and know-how (Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995; Nonaka and Konno, 1998). Tacit knowledge often involves activities at individual, group and organizational levels (Collis, 1991) which are often invisible to outsiders of a particular organizational context. In an organization, tacit knowledge is embedded not only on individual brains but also organizational routines, cultures, and contexts. From the outset, tacit knowledge shows low articulability, codiability, and transparency (Winter, 1987). The creation and acquisition of tacit knowledge is much more difcult than that of explicit knowledge, because of its socially complex and context-specic character (Barney, 1992), and its connectedness with other co-specialized assets (Teece, 1986). Organizations owning tacit knowledge can sustain the competitive 98
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Sources of knowledge acquisition taining competitive advantage (Cohen and Fields, 1999). Above all Granovetter (1973, 1982)1 pointed out the value of non-redundant weak ties, as the spread of new information, ideas and opportunities often comes through these weak ties that connect people in separate cohesive groups. Information often circulates at high velocity within a cohesive group of people who have strong overlapping relations, and each person tends to know what the others know. Strong ties are often associated with the sharing of knowledge that already exists in the local cohesive group or community, while weak ties connecting separate groups or communities transfer novel information that often contributes to creativity and innovation. People who have more weak ties are more likely to achieve business success and contribute to technological innovations as they can obtain new information of value quickly, thus having opportunities to work as broker, information gatekeeper, or opinion leader (Burt, 2001, 2004). other informal gatherings. Towards the end of the eld study, 15 formal interviews were also carried out with all software engineers in ASDC. In a second stage a questionnaire survey was carried out during MarchApril 2002 for enriching the available ethnographic data from a single case study with quantitative data. Six software companies, including ASDC, took part in this survey. The sampling process of all six companies can be characterized as convenience sampling (Bryman, 2004), one of the popular non-probability sampling techniques. The main aim of this survey was to map the complete advice-seeking network in each companys software engineering community. The researcher acquired a roster of software engineers in each target company prior to the survey and got the permission and cooperation of the companys senior management for contacting each and every software engineer. The companies shared some common characteristics: all were small rms with a few software project development teams. In total, there were 135 software engineers, who formed 23 project teams, in these six companies. All 135 engineers returned survey questionnaires. Note that each team was developing independently custom-built software without formal collaboration across team boundary. The biggest teams included 10 software engineers, while the smallest one only had two members at the time of the eldwork. The questionnaire among other questions, asked all respondents to indicate from whom s/he had asked advice in the past months and according to what frequency. Statistical analysis is used below to test the advice seeking activities in the six local communities of practice. In other parts of the discussion below survey data are mainly presented in the form of descriptive statistics to support relevant propositions derived from the ethnographic case study at ASDC.

3. Research methodology
This research is exploratory in nature having adopted a triangulated two-stage approach. In the rst stage an ethnographic case study (Yin, 1994) was conducted in early 2002 for breaking new ground in understanding collaboration and advice seeking in software development. According to Bryman (2004), ethnography allows researchers to study in depth the everyday behaviour of an organization or community in its natural setting. It was thought appropriate for aligning this research with social learning theory, which highlights that knowledge acquisition is closely associated with ongoing practices within specic social, cultural, and organizational contexts. The organization studied was a small size software company, Advanced System Development Corporation, Ltd. (ASDC), established in Beijing, in 1994, as a joint venture between IBM and Tsinghua Universitys Department of Computer Science. Participant observation took place for three and a half months in ASDC. The researcher joined the company and stayed in its software development room all working hours. He had his own cubicle at the central part of the room, and therefore could hear and see what engineers were talking and doing without being noticed. The researcher built good personal relationships with the ASDC software engineers and frequently talked with them on research-related topics over lunch or
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4. Sources of knowledge acquisition 4.1. Technical books and online searching

Technical problems arise constantly in software development. When a technical problem appears, engineers rst try to solve it by personal efforts, such as checking the code, testing assumptions and using development tools to diagnose what is wrong. The engineers often look up technology books or search online resources to acquire the necessary information and knowledge. Books and
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Dimitris Assimakopoulos and Jie Yan the Internet are always at hand in software development. Simple technical problems are caused when engineers forget a parameter of a function, a denition of a class, or a syntax standard. In these cases, books or online searches are the easiest ways for nding solutions. Such sources provide codied knowledge supporting the software engineers daily activities. However, as one engineer pointed out technology is dead, while technical problems are alive. Such problems differ in thousands of ways in reallife situations. Many technical problems are quite complex and difcult to dene. Often an engineer cannot easily nd out what exactly is wrong, or what has caused such ill-dened problems. Tacit knowledge is required to solve such ill-dened problems. Our research shows that when engineers fail to get solutions from technical books or online searches, they rely on collective discussions and active advice seeking as sources for knowledge creation and exchange. Most often engineers turn to colleagues within the company and local community of practice, before tapping into external sources of knowledge, such as personal networks or specialized Internet software technology forums. All in turn are discussed next. enables software engineers to accomplish their system design work on a communal basis. But how do engineers choose their advice seeking target colleague? At random, or there is an underlying pattern? Participant observation suggests that although each engineers advice seeking targets are often distributed all over the company, engineers prefer to seek advice more often from their colleagues in the same project team than those belonging in other teams. Statistical techniques are used next to validate this nding by comparing the intensity of adviceseeking behaviour within and across team boundary using the weak/strong ties argument put forward by Granovetter (1973, 1982). Based on our survey ndings there were 437 advice-seeking linkages in the six companies at the time of the eldwork. Frequency of interaction, as discrete value of 1, 2, 5, 15, and 30 times during a period of 2 weeks, is used to measure the intensity of advice-seeking linkages. Each engineer has 3.27 linkages on average, while the mean of the value of advice-seeking linkages is 8.07 per engineer. This is consistent with the data from participant observation which suggests that, on average, the engineers turn to colleagues for informal discussions twice or three times everyday. We classify for the purposes of the analysis below the advice-seeking linkages into two broad categories: strong and weak ties, according to the frequency of advice-seeking relationships taking place through each linkage. We assume that a strong tie should have much greater value than the mean value of eight advice-seeking linkages during a period of 2 weeks, and to some extent arbitrarily, set the threshold of strong ties at 15. A strong tie is therefore dened as a linkage when the frequency of advice seeking is equal to or above 15 times over a period of 2 weeks. On the other hand, a weak tie is a linkage with frequency less than 15 times over 2 weeks. Overall there are 140 strong and 297 weak ties in our dataset. Four pairs of indicators are compared by paired sample t-tests, which are used to compute the differences between values of two variables for each case and test whether the average differs from zero. Tables 1 and 2 summarize the SPSS outputs. 4.2.1. Pair 1: weak ties within teams vs weak ties across teams The comparison between the weak ties within and across team boundaries aims at revealing whether the weak ties are equally distributed. Results show there is no signicant difference between
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4.2. Local community of practice

Advice-seeking linkages most often take place in the local software engineering community of practice. Engineers usually walk to a colleagues cubicle and ask their questions directly. They may take a seat, or just stand by. The discussion usually takes a few minutes, or, in some rare instances, could last up to an hour. In few cases, a discussion may attract more engineers and become a group discussion. Engineers may make use of a computer to design and check possible solutions. Although the engineers usually lower their voice during discussions, their colleagues in nearby cubicles can hear them. During such collective discussions, software engineers exhibit what Rittel (1984) calls symmetry of ignorance in their common practice. Everyone seems to know something related to the problem, but nobody knows everything. The participants provide various assumptions and suggestions; some are refuted immediately, while some others are given up after tests. This is followed by another round of discussions until an acceptable solution is achieved. In this way, informal advice seeking and knowledge exchange 100
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Table 1. Advice-seeking within and across team boundary basic statistics Variables to be compared Pair 1 Pair 2 Pair 3 Pair 4 Weak ties within team Weak ties across team Strong ties within the team Strong ties across teams Ties within the team Ties across teams Instances of advice seeking within the team Instances of advice seeking across teams Mean 7.48 5.00 4.87 1.04 12.35 6.04 118.17 31.43 N 23 23 23 23 23 23 23 23 SD 6.563 3.289 3.18 1.36 8.71 3.50 73.10 25.71 SEM 1.369 .686 0.66 0.29 1.82 0.73 15.24 5.36

Table 2. Advice seeking within and across team boundary paired samples t-test Paired differences Mean Pair Pair Pair Pair 1 2 3 4 2.48 3.83 6.31 86.74 SD 6.529 3.35 8.14 72.36 SEM 1.361 0.70 1.70 15.09 1.820 5.47 3.72 5.75 22 22 22 22 0.082 0.000 0.001 0.000 T df Signicance*

*Two-tailed.

the means of these two variables (t 1.82,4 P40.05, two-tailed). This however is not the case in the next pair. 4.2.2. Pair 2: strong ties within teams vs strong ties across teams The comparison of this pair aims showing whether the strong ties within team are any different from those across team boundaries. The two variables have a signicant difference (t 5.47, Po0.001, two-tailed), as there are more strong ties within teams (mean 4.87, standard deviation (SD) 3.18) compared with the strong ties across teams (mean 1.04, SD 1.36). The difference is so large that there are just over four times more strong ties within teams than there are across team boundaries. 82.40% of the strong ties exist within teams, and only 17.60% across project team boundaries. This contrasts markedly to pair 1 where there is no signicant difference between the weak ties within and across teams. 4.2.3. Pair 3: ties within teams vs ties across teams The comparison of this pair aims to show whether the total ties (the sum of strong and weak ties) within teams are different from those across team boundaries. It shows that the number of ties within teams is signicantly different from that across teams (t 3.72, P 0.001, two-tailed). The mean of ties within teams is 12.35 (SD 8.71), while the mean of ties across teams is 6.04 (SD 3.50). The ties within teams account for 67.2% to the sum of
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ties, more than double the number to the ties across team boundaries (32.8%). 4.2.4. Pair 4: instances of advice seeking within teams vs instances of advice seeking across teams This comparison can be seen as a summary of the above three comparisons. The instances of advice seeking are the sum of the value (frequency) of all the ties under corresponding categories. The difference is signicant (t 5.75, Po0.001, twotailed). There are 118.17 instances of advice seeking occurred over a period of 2 weeks within each team (SD 73.10), but only 31.43 instances across team boundaries (SD 25.71). The advice seeking that occurred within teams accounted for 79.0% of the total advice seeking, while that across team boundaries only accounted for 21.0%. Unsurprisingly the analysis above shows most of the local advice seeking behaviour takes place among engineers in the same project team. When software engineers asked to corroborate this nding, most of them insisted that when they have a technical problem begging for discussion with colleagues, they think rst about who may be able to help and has the necessary experience for providing useful information. They did however agree that they unconsciously chose team colleagues. More importantly in our survey questionnaire survey, 85% of software engineers have chosen the statement that team colleagues know each others work tasks, and thus can easily understand the specic context of a problem in hand.
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Dimitris Assimakopoulos and Jie Yan Problems in software development are not only related to the generic programming language and techniques, but also closely associated with the context-specic domain knowledge and project techniques embedded in a system design. Each part of a complex system design may have many visible or hidden relations with other parts of a system. Team colleagues certainly know more about such tacit knowledge than engineers outside a project. When discussing a problem with colleagues outside a project team, additional effort has to be made to explain the contextspecic knowledge related to this particular problem. It seems therefore pertinent to examine in greater detail the role of personal networks in advice seeking and knowledge exchange in software development.

4.4. Internet software technology forums

Unlike guanxi networks, when software engineers cannot get solutions from within their local community of practice they cross over to Chinese language Internet software technology forums seeking advice and discussing technical problems. There are several active Internet forums where software engineers participate, for example, China Software Developer Net (CSDN) or Tsinghua University BBS (see http://www.CSDN.net or http://bbs.tsinghua.edu.cn). CSDN is the most popular since about 80,000 individuals visit the forum with unique IP address, and, deliver more than 1,500,000 page views (CSDN, 2002). Most of them are professional software developers in IT rms all over China. There are always 2,000 3,000 software developers online in the forum during working hours. Every day, hundreds, if not thousands of technical problems are posted and discussed in this technical forum. Seeking advice in Internet forums is like participating in an online bulletin board. The engineer describes the problem in brief, posts it in the forum, and then waits for replies. In some forums, such as CSDN, replies usually come back within a few hours, if not minutes. The reply often points out what is wrong and gives possible solutions. The senders are often software professionals having experience and knowledge about similar problems. Most replies are few lines in length; few words seem enough to help solve specic problems. Some posts however include original code and may be longer up to several pages. The vast majority of messages are written in mixed Chinese and English language, i.e. the software program code in English, and the diagnosis of the problem and suggestions for possible solutions in Chinese. In some cases when the problem is rather complex, the exchanges often evolve into an interactive discussion among many interested participants. The nal solutions often seem to be a collaborative group result. The engineer who initially asked a question often reports back to the forum with the results, including input and output, mistake messages, compiler feedback, and other related information. In this way, more and more contextual information is provided and the online discussion goes deeper and deeper. Although most of the online discussions are exhausted within 10 exchanges, it is not infrequent to see some enquiries getting back 30 or more replies. Sometimes this interactive discussion would last a few hours, even 1 or 2 days. Questions often get solutions after several rounds
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4.3. Personal networks/guanxi

In China, inter-personal relationships of a social nature are often termed as guanxi. Guanxi networks are considered as one of the most important resources for Chinese people to make and sustain business (Gold et al., 2001). Besides providing friendship and support, guanxi networks have some special characteristics rooted in the Chinese cultural environment. Guanxi often imply a continuous ongoing exchange of favours related to business as much as personal linkages related to friendship and the like (Gabrenya and Hwang, 1996). People often rely on guanxi networks to get advantage over those who do not have guanxi for scarce resources, such as information, material support and even business contracts (Yao, 2002). Initially we expected that software engineers would make use of their personal guanxi network to seek advice for their daily technical activities. However, participant observation suggests that contacting personal guanxi linkages seems the last choice for software engineers to solve technical problems. The engineers would rather check technology books, discuss with colleagues within the local community of practice, or enquire in Internet technology forums, as we discuss next, than contacting personal guanxi linkages outside the company. Based on the questionnaire survey, only a tiny number of engineers (2%) preferred to seek advice rst with personal linkages outside the company. This nding clearly backs up participant observations at the ASDC where software engineers rarely contacted their personal linkages out of company for seeking advice in relation to technical problems. 102
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Sources of knowledge acquisition of exchanges. However, what it rarely happens is that an enquiry gets no reply. Compared with the internal advice seeking within the local community of practice, the frequency of online enquiries is less intensive. Based on the ndings of our survey, one-fth of the software engineers state that they seek advice in Internet forums at least once every day. Over half of the engineers ask questions from once to three times every week. The other quarter enquire in Internet forums about once every 2 weeks or less. About half of the respondents state that the Internet forums are important to their work. Only 7% of the respondents choose the statement that Internet forums are not important at all and they do not use them for carrying out their daily work. Three factors may contribute to the software engineers preference of Internet forums over personal guanxi networks. The rst one is the diversity of support Internet forums can provide. Often large and diversied networks provide more support than small homogeneous networks (Haines and Hurlbert, 1992). For ordinary people, it is not easy to maintain a large number of direct personal linkages, say, over 30. It is impossible that software engineers could always nd somebody in their personal network having knowledge and experience about their everyday problems. However, the situation in Internet forums is different. The specialized forums often gather a large number of software professionals, which ensure the diversity and critical mass of technical backgrounds of the participants for fuelling ongoing discussions and serving as useful sources of technical knowledge. The second factor is the efciency of communication and quality of discussion. In order to get instant response and interactive discussion, software engineers prefer telephone to email when they ask for help from personal guanxi linkages outside their own company. They have to call them one by one, and to explain the problem again and again. It is often like a trial and error process, which is rather time consuming in a sequential mode. While in Internet forums, enquiries are published to thousands of software professionals at the same time. Replies are always coming in a short time. The respondents are also sitting in front of their computers with various software development tools available and it is easy for them to communicate, to discuss, to try and test potential solutions real time. The people who provide suggestions are always those who have knowledge and experience about the problem or who are interested in it, and therefore the
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quality of the discussion is better than friends who may not be readily available, knowledgeable, or directly interested in a particular problem. The third reason is related to the Chinese culture itself. Many engineers seem to believe that advice seeking from guanxi linkages out of company should be the last choice, as receiving help from a guanxi linkage means owing a renqing, i.e. a favour to be returned in due time (Gabrenya and Hwang, 1996). However, renqing does not exist in Internet forums. The participants are unknown to each other; they get involved in the ongoing discussions just because they are interested and voluntarily want to do so. Every participant in online discussions accumulates tacit knowledge, learns something which can not be found in books and the like, and perhaps this is the most important benet for the software engineering community at large.

5. Conclusions and implications for R&D managers

The analysis above illustrates how Chinese software engineers make effective use of complementary sources of knowledge within a broad spectrum of choices for searching information, seeking advice, learning how to solve problems, and transferring knowledge to the local community of practice far beyond organizational boundaries. Engineers rely on the following sources to acquire knowledge for their daily development work. Firstly, they read technology books and search information on the Internet. These sources provide explicit knowledge explaining the details of a specic technique in a rather abstract and static way. When facing difcult-to-dene technical problems engineers need to go beyond a static explanation so they turn to team colleagues to discuss their specic problems. The tacit understanding of the context-specic knowledge of each project makes communication with team colleagues quite effective (see Section 4.2). When colleagues within the local community of practice cannot provide solutions, engineers turn to external sources to acquire knowledge. Most of the external advice seeking behaviour occurs in specialized Internet software technology forums (see Section 4.4). According to our ndings, engineers rarely tap into their personal guanxi networks. The ndings of this research may prove valuable to knowledge intensive rms, in particular software and other computer-based organizations, desiring to manage their R&D more proR&D Management 36, 1, 2006

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Dimitris Assimakopoulos and Jie Yan ductively. As tacit knowledge is produced and shared in daily problem-solving activity, R&D managers need to make efforts to foster daily informal discussions, rather than trying to directly manage the knowledge acquisition and sharing process. Our nding that most of the software engineers prefer team colleagues as their rst choice for advice seeking implies that it may be useful for R&D managers to reorganize frequently project teams promoting knowledge sharing within the local community of practice. Some companies maintain project teams for successive generations of projects, as they seem to believe that engineers who work together for a long time would be more familiar with each other and thus have more productive collaborative relationships. Stable membership of project teams however may restrict the engineers choice of advice seeking and would lead to relatively closed circles of knowledge sharing affecting adversely the efciency of problem solving within the local community. This research also highlights the importance of specialized Internet technology forums as a key source of knowledge acquisition for software engineers. External linkages of a personal nature have been highlighted as the key channels for transferring information for innovation across organizational boundaries (Allen, 1977; Rogers, 1982; Johannisson, 1998; Powell, 1998; Assimakopoulos and Macdonald, 2003b). However, this research shows how Internet-based sources of knowledge acquisition can overshadow personal networks. Unlike dyadic relationships in personal networks, people in Internet forums build up personal communities of many-to-many virtual relationships (Wellman, 1999). The technical questions posted by unknown members of technology forums are discussed and solved, regardless of the members physical location, organization afliation, and technical background. Internet technology forums therefore facilitate the creation and exchange of technical knowledge across organizational boundaries mitigating the role of technological gatekeepers (Allen, 1977) in innovation processes. For a local software engineering community, problems solved by external knowledge sources, mainly Internet software technology forums, are often the toughest ones, as they have remained unresolved through the use of internal sources. Successful solutions found through external sources are often the most valuable as they are most likely completely new ones to the local software engineer community of practice, and thus have great value for local learning and innovation. 104
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R&D managers in China and elsewhere ought to encourage systematically their knowledge workers to make use of Internet resources, in particular Internet based technology forums. As our analysis highlighted above, Internetbased technology forums in China can facilitate interactive and timely tacit knowledge acquisition beyond the rm boundary. Some companies in China have put in place restrictive policies forbidding employees accessing the Internet during working hours. This restriction can be a perilous and shortsighted action as it may work in an environment where the knowledge base is stable without a continuous need of updating and access to tacit knowledge. However, in knowledge intensive organizations, like software rms, keeping engineers, or other knowledge workers, away from Internet resources, such as technical forums during working hours would most likely result in fewer opportunities for learning and slower innovation. Future researchers should also pay attention to the limitations of this research. The six software companies surveyed are not representative of all small rms in China. The specic socio-cultural environment also should be taken into account. For example, the renqing implication may not exist in personal networks in other cultural settings, where people exchange information freely without a moral obligation of future re-payments. Last but not least, the Chinese language Internet software technology forums have an unusual large number of memberships. This merits further research in other countries and organizational settings.

References
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Dimitris Assimakopoulos and Jie Yan

Notes
1. Communities of practice are actually collections of tightly intertwined interpersonal networks. As stated by Wenger et al. (2002, p. 58), the heart of a community is the web of relationships among com-

munity members, and much of the day-to-day occurs in one-to-one exchanges. The community members are linked by ongoing dyadic relations and the daily based knowledge interactions which form a well knit network of interpersonal relationships.

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