Introduction

Information culture is a context-specific circumstance, affecting all information-related activities and practices in an organization. There are many tacit elements connected to information culture affecting workplace information practices. All our personas, Ann, Johan and Liila, have strong professional identities with very clear goals, work tasks and decisionmaking processes. They also have their individual preferences for e.g. information sources, and their information behaviour is affected by their demographic and socio-psychological factors. However, entering the workplace, there are organizational factors intervening with the individual ones. The workplace factors make a strong framework to which employees adapt, namely the information culture of the organization.

Ann, our cardiologist, is a social and outgoing person, and in her everyday life she interacts with other people as information and knowledge sources on equal footing. However, she works in a hospital where the hierarchies are very strong, where doctors are expected to make their decisions in consultation with seniors and peers, but not in discussion at length with the healthcare personnel, while social networks are mainly seen as timeconsuming contexts. There she will adjust to the workplace traditions and use fewer social connections than she would in other situations.

Johan, our lawyer, is a person who likes to work individually and usually turns to a few reliable sources. He enters a new law firm where teamwork is a key value and the leadership style is to support interactive decision making. Johan will still prefer his individual working style, but will also with time adjust to the teamwork environment while everyone else is working in that way.

Liila, our journalist, is young and used to using social media for communicating with her friends and family. She also actively follows social media to keep up with newsfeeds on topics that are relevant for her work. At her workplace, however, the internal communication is done via e-mails and the weekly meetings are the cornerstone of sharing information with colleagues. Although Liila is used to instant information and knowledge sharing in her everyday life, she will learn to value the structured and in some ways slower pace of information sharing.

Having said that information culture is a strong framework to which employees adapt, the development of an information culture is a two-way interaction process. Individuals affect the culture and the culture affects individuals.