Catherine M. Ridings

Professor Ridings is the Director of the BIS program in the College of Business. She teaches Electronic Commerce, Business Data Management, and Business Application Programming.

Her primary research interest is virtual communities, including social networks, social capital, trust, knowledge management and electronic commerce in this context. She also has secondary research interests in technology adoption and acceptance. She has published in journals such as Journal of Management Information Systems, The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems, and Journal of Strategic Information Systems. Her dissertation, "Determinants of Trust and Use in Virtual Communities," won the Decision Sciences Institute's 2001 Elwood S. Buffa Doctoral Dissertation Award Competition.

Professor Ridings holds degrees in Decision Sciences with concentrations in Management Information Systems. Prior to academia, she worked in industry for 8 years managing software developers building a large scale client-server customer contact application for Bell Atlantic (presently Verizon Corporation).

 

Education

• Drexel University, M.B.A., Ph.D.

Research Interests

• Virtual communities
• Social Networks
• Social capital
• Electronic Commerce

• Ridings, Catherine; Wasko, Molly. "Online discussion group sustainability: Investigating the interplay between structural dynamics and social dynamics over time." Journal of the Association of Information Systems, forthcoming.
• Gefen, David; Ragowsky, Arik; Ridings, Catherine. "Leadership and Justice: Increasing non-participating users' assessment of an IT through passive participation."Information and Management (45:8), 2008, 507-512.
• Ridings, Catherine; Gefen, David; Arinze, Bay. "Psychological Barriers: Lurker and Poster Motivation and Behavior in Online Communities," Communications of the AIS(18:16), 2006, 329-354.
• Gefen, David and Ridings, Catherine. "If You Spoke As She Does, Sir, Instead of The Way You Do: A Sociolinguistics Perspective of Gender Differences in Virtual Communities," The DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems, (36:2), 2005, pp. 78-92.
• Ridings, Catherine and Gefen, David, "Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online," Journal of Computer Mediated Communication (10:1), 2004.
• Gefen, David and Ridings, Catherine. "IT Acceptance: Managing User-IT Group Boundaries," The DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems (34:3), 2003, pp. 25-40.
• Ridings, Catherine, Gefen, David, Arinze, B. "Some antecedents and effects of trust in virtual communities", The Journal of Strategic Information Systems (11:3-4), 2002, pp. 271-295.
• Gefen, David and Ridings, Catherine M., "Implementation Team Responsiveness and User Evaluation of Customer Relationship Management: A Quasi-Experimental Design Study of Social Exchange Theory," Journal of Management Information Systems (19:1), 2002, pp. 47-69.
• Ridings, Catherine and Gefen, David, "Applying TAM to a Parallel Systems
• Conversion Strategy," Journal of Information Technology Theory & Application (2:2), 2000, p. 1-11.