Dynamics of Community Engagement: The Role of Interpersonal Communicative Genres in Online Community Evolutions

In order to understand how specific communities might develop over time, it is important to take into account how the broader phenomenon of online consumer communities is itself situated in a bigger social context. As a whole, online communities can be seen as micro-social groups ( Maffesoli, 1996 ) that exist at the “forgotten” level in consumer research ( Bagozzi, 2000 ). This micro-social level, between individual and macro/cultural levels, is the level at which interactions and communications between people take place ( Cova & Cova, 2002 ).