Social media are increasingly implemented in work organizations as tools for communication among employees. It is important that we develop an understanding of how they enable and constrain the ...communicative activities through which work is accomplished because it is these very dynamics that constitute and perpetuate organizations. We begin by offering a definition of enterprise social media and providing a rough historical account of the various avenues through which these technologies have entered and continue to enter the workplace. We also review areas of research covered by papers in this special issue and papers on enterprise social media published elsewhere to take stock of the current state of out knowledge and to propose directions for future research.
This paper has three goals. The first is to understand why members of one organizational department are blind to the reasons why members of another department do not share their ideas for a new ...technology-what I call a "technology concept." The second is to understand what consequences this "innovation blindness" has for the development of technology concepts across organizational and occupational boundaries. The third is to uncover strategies organizations might use to successfully develop a new technological artifact from the technology concept even if innovators never understand the nature of their own blindness. To achieve these goals, I draw on research on organizational cultural toolkits to construct a framework suggesting that technology concepts frame cultural resources, which are then used to construct the very problems the technological artifact will be built to solve. From this perspective, culture does not directly shape technological artifacts. Rather, a technology concept activates culture as it draws frames around resources that will guide people's problem construction practices. By acting as a frame through which problems can be constructed, technology concepts play a key role in selecting the set of cultural resources that will be used to develop technological artifacts. I explore this framework through a qualitative study of computer simulation software in a major automotive engineering firm.
Research Summary: This study introduces the notion of attention allocation in networks to argue that individuals with different types of network structure produce good ideas via different pathways. ...Using survey data on communication networks at a software company, we find that people with highly constrained networks generate good ideas by following a logic of interrogation, by which they focus their attention on information from a particular contact. Conversely, individuals with less constrained networks produce good ideas by following a logic of recombination, whereby they divide their attention to information coming from across multiple contacts. The results show that in highly constrained networks, interrogation is a more reliable pathway to good ideas than recombination. We discuss the implications of these findings for behavioral strategy, social networks, and innovation. Managerial Summary: People can develop good ideas when they recombine diverse information inputs shared by non-redundant communication partners that span multiple local clusters. But, in an organization, most individuals are embedded in constrained networks of people who know each other and thus typically receive redundant information from work colleagues. This study suggests that they can innovate via a different pathway: through interrogation. We find that people who focus their attention on information coming from a particular person succeed at generating good ideas because they deeply interrogate local knowledge and develop domain-specific insights.
This paper offers a theory of communication visibility based on a field study of the implementation of a new enterprise social networking site in a large financial services organization. The emerging ...theory suggests that once invisible communication occurring between others in the organization becomes visible for third parties, those third parties could improve their metaknowledge (i.e., knowledge of
who knows what
and
who knows whom
). Communication visibility, in this case made possible by the enterprise social networking site, leads to enhanced awareness of who knows what and whom through two interrelated mechanisms: message transparency and network translucence. Seeing the contents of other’s messages helps third-party observers make inferences about coworkers' knowledge. Tangentially, seeing the structure of coworkers' communication networks helps third-party observers make inferences about those with whom coworkers regularly communicate. The emerging theory further suggests that enhanced metaknowledge can lead to more innovative products and services and less knowledge duplication if employees learn to work in new ways. By learning vicariously rather than through experience, workers can more effectively recombine existing ideas into new ideas and avoid duplicating work. Moreover, they can begin to proactively aggregate information perceived daily rather than engaging in reactive search after confronting a problem. I discuss the important implications of this emerging theory of communication visibility for work in the knowledge economy.
The argument proffered in this paper is that use of enterprise social networking technologies can increase the accuracy of people’s metaknowledge (knowledge of “who knows what” and “who knows whom”) ...at work. The results of a quasi-natural field experiment in which only one of two matched-sample groups within a large financial services firm was given access to the enterprise social networking technology for six months revealed that by making people’s communications with specific partners visible to others in the organization, the technology enabled observers to become aware of the communications occurring amongst their coworkers and to make inferences about what and whom those coworkers knew based on the contents of the messages they sent and to whom they were sent. Consequently only individuals in the group that used the social networking technology for six months improved the accuracy of their metaknowledge (a 31% improvement in knowledge of who knows what and an 88% improvement in knowledge of who knows whom). There were no improvements in the other group over the same time period. Based on these findings, how technologically enabled “ambient awareness”—awareness of ambient communications occurring amongst others in the organization—can be an important antecedent for knowledge acquisition is discussed.
Background
The aetiology and pathogenesis of endometriosis are still under investigation. There is evidence that there is a complex bidirectional interaction between endometriosis and the microbiome.
...Objective
To systematically review the available literature on the endometriosis–microbiome interaction, with the aim of guiding future inquiries in this emerging area of endometriosis research.
Search strategy
MEDLINE, Embase, Scopus and Web of Science were searched through May 2019. A manual search of reference lists of relevant studies was also performed.
Selection criteria
Published and unpublished literature in any language describing a comparison of the microbiome state in mammalian hosts with and without endometriosis.
Data collection and analysis
Identified studies were screened and assessed independently by two authors. Data were extracted and compiled in a qualitative synthesis of the evidence.
Main results
Endometriosis appears to be associated with an increased presence of Proteobacteria, Enterobacteriaceae, Streptococcus spp. and Escherichia coli across various microbiome sites. The phylum Firmicutes and the genus Gardnerella also appear to have an association; however, this remains unclear.
Conclusions
The complex bidirectional relationship between the microbiome and endometriosis has begun to be characterised by the studies highlighted in this systematic review. Laboratory and clinical studies demonstrate that there are indeed differences in the microbiome composition of hosts with and without endometriosis.
Tweetable
Review findings show endometriosis associated with increased Proteobacteria, Enterobacteriaceae, Streptococcus and Escherichia coli across various microbiome sites.
Tweetable
Review findings show endometriosis associated with increased Proteobacteria, Enterobacteriaceae, Streptococcus and Escherichia coli across various microbiome sites.
Employees in many contemporary organizations work with flexible routines and flexible technologies. When those employees find that they are unable to achieve their goals in the current environment, ...how do they decide whether they should change the composition of their routines or the materiality of the technologies with which they work? The perspective advanced in this paper suggests that the answer to this question depends on how human and material agencies—the basic building blocks common to both routines and technologies—are imbricated. Imbrication of human and material agencies creates infrastructure in the form of routines and technologies that people use to carry out their work. Routine or technological infrastructure used at any given moment is the result of previous imbrications of human and material agencies. People draw on this infrastructure to construct a perception that a technology either constrains their ability to achieve their goals, or that the technology affords the possibility of achieving new goals. The case of a computer simulation technology for automotive design used to illustrate this framework suggests that perceptions of constraint lead people to change their technologies while perceptions of affordance lead people to change their routines. This imbrication metaphor is used to suggest how a human agency approach to technology can usefully incorporate notions of material agency into its explanations of organizational change.
Research shows that displaying face time—being observed by others at work—leads to many positive outcomes for employees. Drawing on this prior work, we argue that face time helps employees to receive ...better work and leads to career advancement because it is a strong signal of their commitment to their job, their team, and their organization. But when employees are geographically distributed from managers who control the assignment of work, they are often unable to display face time. To compensate, employees must engage in other behaviors that signal commitment. Our study of two large, globally distributed, product-development companies demonstrates that employees who engage in certain behaviors can effectively signal their commitment to the organization and, as a consequence, will receive better work assignments. But because they operate in a competitive signaling environment, they have to continually engage in the behaviors that produce desired signals to the point where they often feel that they are sacrificing their personal lives for their job. We induct a model from our data that explains why simple behaviors that signal commitment eventually turn into feelings of sacrifice and why employees at headquarters who have the power to assign better work fail to notice the sacrifice behind the signals. We discuss the implications of this model and the signal misalignment it explains for theories of distributed work and signaling in organizations.
The online appendix is available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2018.1265
.
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