Social Media and Organizing – An Empirical Analysis of the Role of Wiki Affordances in Organizing Practices (original) (raw)
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The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 2018
In response to the challenge of socializing new IT employees, some IT departments are exploring the incorporation of enterprise social media (hereinafter ESM) as an informal organizational socialization tool. Because this is a relatively new phenomenon, little is known about how ESM facilitate employee socialization. In order to contribute to our understanding of how ESM affects employee socialization, this paper invokes a case study to explore how one organization's implementation of an ESM for its IT new hire program influenced the socialization process and outcomes. To delve deeply into how the ESM influences socialization, we draw upon technology affordance theory to uncover the various first and second-order affordances actualized by different actor groups and the various outcomes resulting from the affordances. We then identify five generative mechanismsbureaucracy circumvention, executive perspective, personal development, name recognition, and morale boosterthat explain how the actualization of different strands of affordances by various groups of users produces eight different outcomes. Our results provide insights into the different affordances made possible by ESM in the context of a new hire socialization program and how these affordances have repercussions beyond those experienced by the individuals using the ESM. The results have important implications for new hire socialization and technology affordance research.
The Contradictory Influence of Social Media Affordances on Online Communal Knowledge Sharing
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2013
The use of social media creates the opportunity to turn organization-wide knowledge sharing in the workplace from an intermittent, centralized knowledge management process to a continuous online knowledge conversation of strangers, unexpected interpretations and re-uses, and dynamic emergence. We theorize four affordances of social media representing different ways to engage in this publicly visible knowledge conversations: metavoicing, triggered attending, network-informed associating, and generative role-taking. We further theorize mechanisms that affect how people engage in the knowledge conversation, finding that some mechanisms, when activated, will have positive effects on moving the knowledge conversation forward, but others will have adverse consequences not intended by the organization. These emergent tensions become the basis for the implications we draw.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2013
This study explores the ways in which the affordances of social media not only increase open communication and knowledge sharing, but also promote covert behavior, creating dialectical tensions for distributed workers that must be communicatively managed. Drawing on a case study of the engineering division of a distributed high tech start-up, we find our participants navigate tensions in visibility-invisibility, engagement-disengagement, and sharing-control and strategically manage these tensions to preserve both openness and ambiguity. These findings highlight ways in which organizational members limit as well as share knowledge through social media, and the productive role of tensions in enabling them to attend to multiple goals.
The use of social media technologies-such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, social tagging, and microblogging-is proliferating at an incredible pace. One area of increasing adoption is organizational settings where managers hope that these new technologies will help improve important organizational processes. However, scholarship has largely failed to explain if and how uses of social media in organizations differ from existing forms of computer-mediated communication. In this chapter, we argue that social media are of important consequence to organizational communication processes because they afford behaviors that were diffi cult or impossible to achieve in combination before these new technologies entered the workplace. Our review of previous studies of social media use in organizations uncovered four relatively consistent affordances enabled by these new technologies: Visibility, persistence, editability, and association. We suggest that the activation of some combination of these affordances could infl uence many of the processes commonly studied by organizational communication theorists. To illustrate this point, we theorize several ways through which these four social media affordances may alter socialization, knowledge sharing, and power processes in organizations.
The role of social media for knowledge sharing in distributed organizations: A conceptual framework.
Enterprise social network sites (ESNSs) are increasingly being introduced into large multinational organizations. In this paper, we consider their potential for supporting knowledge- sharing practices within the organization. First, we build upon prior work on affordances by applying notions of collective affordances (Leonardi, 2011, in press) and affordances for organizing (Zammuto et al., 2007) to the study of social media, and we theorize what organizational affordances ESNSs may provide for knowledge sharing in distributed multinational organizations in particular. Second, we articulate ways in which ESNS affordances may shape knowledge sharing through consideration of social capital dynamics, support for relationships and interactions, context collapse, and network interactions. Finally, and building upon these ideas, we propose a research agenda and suggestions for future research on this topic.
Enterprise social network sites (ESNSs) are increasingly being introduced into large multinational organizations. In this paper, we consider their potential for supporting knowledgesharing practices within the organization. First, we build upon prior work on affordances by applying notions of collective affordances (Leonardi, 2011, in press) and affordances for organizing to the study of social media, and we theorize what organizational affordances ESNSs may provide for knowledge sharing in distributed multinational organizations in particular. Second, we articulate ways in which ESNS affordances may shape knowledge sharing through consideration of social capital dynamics, support for relationships and interactions, context collapse, and network interactions. Finally, and building upon these ideas, we propose a research agenda and suggestions for future research on this topic.
When Wiki Technology Meets Corporate Knowledge Management Routines: A Sociomateriality Perspective
Informatics, 2016
There seems to be an inherent tension between wiki affordances-open boundaries, unconstrained editing, and transparency-and traditional knowledge management (KM) routines used in firms. The objective of this study is to investigate how users respond to these tensions during adoption of wiki technology at the workplace. The theoretical lens of sociomateriality highlights the manner in which routines and materiality (namely, technology) relate to one another, providing a useful conceptualization for our investigation. In particular, we adopt Leonardi's theory of human and material imbrication, which stresses the importance of a worker's past experiences with technology in determining his future adoption decisions. Extending Leonardi's conceptualization, we suggest that out-of-work experiences are also influential. Namely, we argue that attitudes towards Wikipedia influence one's response to wiki deployment in the workplace. Using an online survey containing four open-ended questions, we assessed the perceptions of employees towards wiki deployment. Results from our qualitative analysis of 1032 responses reveal five approaches users take in responding to the tensions between wiki affordances and existing KM routines, highlighting the effect of users' dispositions towards Wikipedia. Our findings inform the sociomateriality literature and shed light on the challenges faced by organizations trying to adopt social media tools.
Many organizations today adopt social software such as wikis, weblogs, and social networking services. The wiki-typical simplicity that characterizes the collective editing of articles and the huge growth observed in the Wikipedia model were the main advantages that motivated organizations’ implementation of wikis. However, it is unclear how employees’ perceptions of wiki’s affordances, as a voluntary, open, and flexible technology, facilitates or inhibits wiki use in organizations. In order to gain insight into the potential barriers to wiki adoption in the workplace, this exploratory study, conducted in a high-tech organization where people can choose whether to change routines, technologies, or both, examined employees’ varied perceptions about wiki software affordances and the changes in routine that it entails. Guided by Leonardi’s theory of human and material imbrication, 1032 comments to four open-ended questions were analyzed. The coding processes revealed that users could b...
International Journal of Virtual Communities and Social Networking, 2013
The widespread adoption and use of social media in almost every aspect of our daily lives may outpace existing empirical understandings. In organizations, social media are increasingly used by professional individuals and communities to support dynamic collaboration and knowledge sharing. While there is a growing amount of research on this subject, still little is known on how people use different kinds of social media in practice. That is, there is a need for an empirical understanding that addresses actual use practices of social media within the formal boundaries of organizations. To this end, we report on results from a qualitative comparative study of the use of wikis at two global organizations. Our aim is to develop an empirical understanding of the enactment of structures and the ways by which people structure and organize their wiki use practices by drawing on Orlikowski’s (2000) practice lens. The findings from our analysis suggest a number of enacted structures that reflect diverse wiki use practices. Our main contribution centers on developing three key mechanisms that provide means for understanding the structuring of the use of technology.