There may be many people who perceived that ethics only has application to their personal lives and not to their organizational lives in a business institution. The business of business is to make a profit, and people who work for a business organization must concern themselves with producing goods and services to earn a profit. The reason of this view is popular in some circles because it is easier to deal with capital than with explicit value judgments (Buchholz & Rosenthal, 1998).

Those business organizations have ethical impacts and that they are treated as moral entities, which means virtual communities as an existent part of an organization are a mirror of that organization.

Community's concept is a subject that doesn't provide a discussion due to the nature of its evident relationship with virtual communities. In fact, the term community is not quickly definable, in spite of it’s commonly use, just as Etzioni defends (Etzioni, 1996). On the other hand, many of those definitions show as a perspective contradictory to the society’s idea, because they configure only own interest, individualism and competition (Tönnies, 1887; Durkheim, 1893; Weber, 1978; Von Krogh 2002).

However, we will advocate a different vision that is equally defended by other authors. According to Cardoso (1998) a community is a group of individuals that are organized due to the physical, social and cultural atmosphere. Beamish (1995) still consider the technological component. Bender (1982) advocates that “a community involves a limited number of people in a restricted space or network that stands due to the social mutual understanding and obligation sense. Relationships and frequently intimate, which means individuals are bounded by affective or emotional bows, instead of the individualistic perception.”

In conclusion, the notion of community as a loosely coupled group of people has its roots in sociology (Hillery, 1955). However, the notion of community has become increasingly popular in recent literature from different backgrounds such as CSCW (Computer supported cooperative work) (Ishida, 1998; Schlichter, Koch & Xu, 1998; Koch, 2002), KM (Knowledge Management) (Wenger & Snyder, 2000; Schmidt, 2000) and e-business as well as Internet applications (Bullinger et al., 2002). KM literature in the early 1990ies proposed a whole new perspective on businesses: the knowledge perspective (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Probst et al., 1997). With this new perspective, communities have been discovered as an effective organizational tool to support the flow of knowledge in organizations (Borghoff and Pareschi, 1998; Wenger & Snyder 2000).

However, the even bigger interest in the community notion has been created due to the advent of the Internet in the 1990ies. With the Internet came simple means of communication and cooperation across geographical and organizational boundaries. These electronic means of communication allowed for the first time the formation of global communities around common interests and not only based on geographic proximity, as had mostly been the case before the Internet. Due to the sheer size of such global electronically mediated communities, the positive effects in terms of knowledge creation and exchange can be multiplied. Among the first to mention these electronically mediated, so-called virtual communities were (Rheingold, 1993; Schuler 1995).

Under the broad and ambiguous term community, various more specific types of communities have been identified and described. However, due to the different backgrounds of authors in this field, the nomenclature is ambiguous and overloaded. In (Koch 2002), an overview of the community nomenclature and the relationships between the underlying community concepts is presented.

A number of works have overloaded the term community by using it for technical infrastructures that support communities. In (Mynatt et al., 1997), the term network community is coined for a technical infrastructure that fosters a sense of community among the users. An Internet-based technical infrastructure that provides a sense of community to the members has later often been referred to as online community. In this work, we mean the set of people when we speak about community. We call an application that supports community’s community support application.

The notion of a virtual community from (Rheingold, 1993) has been picked up and elaborated in (Carotenuto et al., 1999). Communication in virtual communities is mostly electronically mediated, although members of a virtual community may interact on a face-to-face basis occasionally (Carotenuto et al., 1999). Or, an online community is a group of people who interact in a virtual environment. They have a purpose, are supported by technology, and are guided by norms and policies (Preece, 2000).

On the other hand, unethical behaviours like copyright violations and others are most common in using technology, which means virtual communities as a part of an organization may give to the society a wrong idea about the ethics of that organization, and that’s why is need a code of best practices to those virtual communities (Intel, 2005), as well as, relate those codes to the organizational ones and in the end focus what measures managers should take to prevent those behaviours… Only it that way it will be possible to answer the question of the paper.

Bibliography

Beamish, A. (1995). Communities on-line: community-based computer networks [on line]. [Massachusetts]: Mit, 1995 [reference 9 July 2006]. Available in the Internet: < http://alberti.mit.arch/4.2A/anneb/thesis/abstract.html >.

Bender, T. 1982. Community and social change in America. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Borghoff, U. & Pareschi, R. (1998) Information Technology for Knowledge Management. Berlin: Springer Press.

Buchholz, R. & Rosenthal, S. (1998). Business ethic- the pragmatic path beyond principles to process. Upper Saddle River: New Jersey. Prentice-Hall.

Bullinger, H. et al. (2002). Business Communities. Galileo Business. Galileo Press. Bonn: Germany.

Cardoso, G. (1998). Para uma sociologia do ciberespaço. Oeiras: Celta Editora.

Carotenuto, L. et al. (1999). Community space: Towards flexible support for voluntary knowledge communities. Workshop on Workspace Models for Collaboration.

Durkheim, E. 1893. The division of labor in society. New York: Macmillan.

Etzioni, A. 1996. The responsive community: A communitarian perspective. American Sociological Review, 61, 1, 1-11.

Hillery, G. (1955). Definitions of community: Areas of agreement. Rural Sociology, 20, 111-123.

Intel. (2005). Digital Communities Best Practices. [s.l.]: Intel.

Ishida, T.(1998). Community Computing. John Wiley and Sons.

Koch, J. (2002). Unterstützung der Formierung und Analyse von virtuellen Communities. PhD thesis. Dept. of Computer Science. Technische Universität München.

Mynatt, E. et al. (1997). Design for network communities. ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 210-217.

Nonaka, I. & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The Knowledge-Creating Company. Oxford University Press.

Preece, J. (2000). Online communities: Designing usability, supporting sociability. C hichester: England. John Wiley & Sons.

Probst, G., Raub, S. & Romhardt, K. (1997). Wissen managen (Managing knowledge). Gabler Press.

Rheingold, H. (1993). The Virtual Community. Addison-Wesley.

Schlichter, J., Koch, M. & Xu, C. (1998). Awareness- the common link between groupware and community support systems. In T. Ishida, editor, Community Computing and Support Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1519, pages 77-93. Springer Verlag.

Schmidt, M. (2000) Knowledge Communities- Mit virtuellen Wissensmärkten Wissen in Unternehmen effektiv nutzen. München: Addison-Wesley.

Schuler, D. (1995). Creating public space in cyberspace- the rise of the new community networks. Internet World, December.

Tönnies, F. 1887. Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society). East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Von Krogh, G. 2002. The communal resource and information systems. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 11, 85-107.

Von Krogh, G., Nonaka, I., & Ichijo, K. (1997). Develop knowledge activists! European Management Journal, 15, 5, 475-483.

Weber, M. 1978. Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft). Berkeley: University of California.

Wenger, E. & Snyder, W. (2000). Communities of practice: The organizational frontier. Harvard Business Review, 139-145, January-February.