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Using a sense making approach, the purpose of this paper is to examine the role that virtual health communities play as a source of informational and social support for pregnant diabetic women. The paper helps to understand how women suffering from a critical medical condition (i.e. diabetes during pregnancy and birth) manage a complex health situation.

The data sample consisted of 507 posts collected from a virtual health community for diabetic pregnant women. Data were analysed deductively looking for different expressions of normality and different types of health information about diabetes.

Content analysis revealed four themes that reflect the process that diabetic women go through from their attempts to conceive through pregnancy and birth. The findings show that for women dealing with a chronic illness such as diabetes, the breakdown of normal was the beginning of the pregnancy that prompted a new range of informational and emotional needs. The members of the community negotiated a socially constructed sense of normality and tried to empower other members with a new sense of normal by sharing information about their births. The findings also showed that members of the community disclosed personal health information to elicit medical information, advice and social support from other members.

The study highlighted the significance of sense-making processes in managing complex health situations and the value of virtual communities as sources of information and social support as to resolve discontinuities in the management of their illnesses.

Modern conflicts are increasingly battles over images and ideas, as protagonists seek to shape audiences’ views by managing the information available through the media. The stake are high: influencing public opinion in a desired direction can have tangible pay‐offs in economic and military terms and even – in the case of the Israel‐Palestine war – in territory. Against this background, the media war can be even more important than the shooting war. While each side in the Israel‐Palestine conflict alleges media bias in favour of the other, a theoretical perspective, the hostile media effect, illuminates seeming contradictions highlighted by these competing claims. While the Israelis are better resourced for public relations purposes than the Palestinians, a vigorous domestic critique of Israeli PR efforts illustrates the limits of PR and emphasises the fluid, “wicked” nature of problems that often face communication managers.

The current study implies self-quantification to consumer behavior and investigates how self-quantification influences consumers' persistence intentions, then indicates the underlying mechanism and examines the role of sharing in social media context.

The hypotheses are tested by three experimental studies. In study 1, the authors test the main effect of self-quantification on persistence intentions and demonstrate goal specificity as the mediator. In study 2 and 3, the authors explore sharing and sharing audience as the moderators.

The current research demonstrates that quantifying personal performance increases consumers' persistence intentions because self-quantification makes the focal goal more specific. However, sharing self-quantification performance with others has a negative effect on the relationship between self-quantification and persistence intentions. Building on goal conflict theory, sharing diverts consumers' focus away from the goal itself and toward others' evaluation and judgment, which makes the focal goal more ambiguous. Moreover, the negative effect depends on who is the sharing audience. When consumers share with close others who hold a similar goal with them, the negative effect of sharing is dramatically reversed.

The present research offers guidelines to managers about how to design self-tracking system to increase user's engagement and how to establish social community on social media platform to motivate users' goal pursuit.

This study contributes to the research of self-quantification from consumer behavior perspective. It also enriches interactive marketing literature by broadening self-quantification relevant research from social interaction dimension.

This study aims to look at the current state of academic research on innovative work behavior (IWB) and how far it has progressed by using key performance analysis and science mapping techniques of bibliometric analysis.

This study has analyzed 246 publications from Web of Science database on IWB from 1989 to 2021. Data were analyzed using MS Excel and VOSviewer.

There has been a rise in the number of academic studies on IWB during the past decade. In addition, it was discovered that a significant percentage of papers had multiple authors working together on them and that collaborations between institutes in Asia and the developed world are taking place.

IWB research trends and trajectories may be assessed to enable academics and practitioners better understand the current and future trends and research directions. Future studies in this field might use the findings as a starting point to highlight the nature of the topic.

Bibliometric techniques provide a far more comprehensive and reliable picture of the field. This article has the potential to serve as a one-stop resource for researchers and practitioners seeking information that can aid in transdisciplinary endeavors by leading them to recognized, peer-reviewed papers, journals and networks.