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The dominant narrative of the Internet has been one of unconstrained growth, abundance, and plenitude. It is in this context that new forms of organizing, such as online groups, have emerged. However, the same factors that underlie the utopian narrative of Internet life also give rise to numerous online groups, many of which fail to attract participants or to provide significant value. This suggests that despite the potential transformative nature of modern information technology, issues of scarcity, competition, and context may remain critical to the performance and functioning of online groups. In this paper, we draw from organizational ecology theories to develop an ecological view of online groups to explain how overlapping membership among online groups causes intergroup competition for member attention and affects a group's ability to grow. Hypotheses regarding the effects of group size, age, and membership overlap on growth are proposed and tested with data from a 64-month, longitudinal sample of 240 online discussion groups. The analysis shows that sharing members with other groups reduced future growth rates, suggesting that membership overlap puts competitive pressure on online groups. Our results also suggest that, compared with smaller and younger groups, larger and older groups experience greater difficulty in growing their membership. In addition, larger groups were more vulnerable to competitive pressure than smaller groups: larger groups experienced greater difficulty in growing their membership than smaller groups as competition intensified. Overall, our findings show how an abundance of opportunities afforded by technologies can create scarcity in user time and effort, which increases competitive pressure on online groups. Our ecological view extends organizational ecology theory to new organizational forms online and highlights the importance of studying the competitive environment of online groups.

The knowledge-based view of the firm has led to greater theoretical interest in how organizations integrate knowledge resources embedded in their employees' expertise. We examine the knowledge-integration problem in geographically dispersed professional organizations in which experts work in project teams. From consideration of coordination costs and local ties, we argue that (1) the organization will develop specialized expertise within local sites, (2) managers avoid crossing geographic boundaries to staff a project unless bringing on a distant expert helps meet customer requirements, (3) cross-site connections help less-needed members participate in dispersed projects, and (4) dispersed projects that have a better match of expertise generate higher net earnings. We tested these hypotheses using archival data and interviews in a geographically dispersed professional service organization. We examined how managers staffed 493 local and dispersed projects over a five-year period, and the financial outcomes of these projects. Managers created dispersed projects comparatively rarely; they did so when scarce expertise from other sites was needed to match customers' project requirements. Dispersed projects garnered higher net earnings than local projects when there was a better match of scarce expertise to project requirements. However, a curvilinear relationship was observed, such that a very high percentage of dispersed experts on a project increased coordination costs and reduced net earnings. Our study extends the knowledge-based view by showing how considerations of coordination costs and social ties affect knowledge integration in the geographically dispersed organization. The study also shows, empirically, the managerial trade-offs that encourage or discourage dispersed collaboration.