Examining Ethics for an Action Research Project in an Enterprise Social Network Enabled Virtual Communities of Practice Environment

The implementation of social media tools in organisations, known as enterprise social networking (ESN), provides a convenient means for staff to share knowledge in informal settings. ESN are used to support a knowledge management technique called communities of practice (CoP), and the use of ESN and CoP for organizational knowledge sharing is the subject of increasing interest and research as awareness of the benefits grows. Action research (AR) is seen as a suitable approach for studies in this field. However, given the people-centric nature of these systems, AR in this area presents considerable ethical dilemmas; brought about by the nature of AR and its research methods, and the nature of use of the ESN tools. This paper addresses how these ethical issues might be dealt with in the course of an AR study that examines how ESN can enable staff knowledge sharing in virtual CoP in a higher education context.