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 study examines the relationship between use of Facebook, a popular online social network site, and the formation and maintenance of social capital. In addition to assessing bonding and bridging ...social capital, we explore a dimension of social capital that assesses one’s ability to stay connected with members of a previously inhabited community, which we call maintained social capital. Regression analyses conducted on results from a survey of undergraduate students (N = 286) suggest a strong association between use of Facebook and the three types of social capital, with the strongest relationship being to bridging social capital. In addition, Facebook usage was found to interact with measures of psychological well‐being, suggesting that it might provide greater benefits for users experiencing low self‐esteem and low life satisfaction.
Providing smallholder farmers with agricultural information could improve economic development, by helping them to grow more crops, which they could then sell for more money. Widespread mobile phone ...ownership in Africa means that, for the first time, there is a realistic opportunity to deliver pertinent information to remote farmers throughout the continent. Efforts to harness the potential of mobile phones include the development of agricultural market information services (MIS) - applications that send farmers crop pricing information via short message service or SMS. These services promote economic development among some farmers in the developing world, but not yet in rural Kenya. To understand what factors impede the adoption of these services, we qualitatively studied Kenyan farmers' mobile phone usage patterns and their interactions with MFarm, a commercially available MIS. Using affordance theory to guide our analysis, we discovered a mismatch between the design of MIS and smallholder farmers' perceptions of their mobile phones' communication capabilities. We use these findings to motivate a design agenda that encourages software developers and development practitioners to adopt an ecological perspective when creating mobile applications for sub-Saharan Africa's rural farmers. Strategies for implementing this approach include reconsidering the design of mobile phones, and developing innovative educational interventions.
Recent team boundary spanning literature has recommended a shift toward assessing the
role of virtual tools – such as social media. Simultaneously the proliferation of
Enterprise Social Media (ESM) ...points to the need to theorize and investigate the
supra-individual usage of these tools, such as their usefulness for organizational groups.
This paper responds to both mandates through a theoretical integration of the team
boundary spanning and existing ESM literature. Using data from two studies – one
qualitative and one quantitative – this papers addresses two important research questions
regarding the empirical relationship between team boundary spanning and ESM for
understanding (i) the types of team boundary-spanning activities that group members enact
through ESM and (ii) the effects of ESM on extra-team stakeholders' perceptions and
reciprocating actions vis-à-vis the team boundary-spanning activities of these group
members. The results of this study show that ESM, largely as a function of their
visibility affordance, supports a narrow set of representational activities, but offers
only limited support for information search and coordination. Furthermore, the findings
reveal that ESM activity has a positive effect on extra-team stakeholders' recognition and
financial support of the representational ESM posts emanating from the boundary-spanning
group. Important implications for theory, strategy, and design are discussed.
Vertical information systems (VIS) standards are technical specifications designed to promote coordination among the organizations within (or across) vertical industry sectors. Examples include the ...bar code, electronic data interchange (EDI) standards, and RosettaNet business process standards in the electronics industry. This contribution examines VIS standardization through the lens of collective action theory, applied in the literature to information technology product standardization, but not yet to VIS standardization, which is led by heterogeneous groups of user organizations rather than by IT vendors. Through an intensive case analysis of VIS standardization in the U.S. residential mortgage industry, VIS standardization success is shown to be as problematic as IT product standardization success, but for different reasons. VIS standardization involves two linked collective action dilemmas-standards development and standards diffusion-with different characteristics, such that a solution to the first may fail to resolve the second. Whereas prior theoretical and empirical research shows that IT product standardization efforts tend to splinter into rival factions that compete through standards wars in the marketplace, successful VIS standards consortia must encompass heterogeneous groups of user organizations and IT vendors without fragmenting. Some tactics successfully used to solve the collective action dilemma of VIS standardization (e.g., governance mechanisms and policies about intellectual property protection) are also used by IT product standardization efforts, but some are different, and successful VIS standardization requires a package of solutions tailored to fit and jointly resolve the specific dilemmas of particular VIS standards initiatives.
There is conflicting evidence as to the current level of awareness and impact of Web Assurance Seal Services (WASSs). This study examines the effects of an educational intervention designed to ...increase consumer's knowledge, of security and privacy aspect of business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce websites and assurance seal services. The study further explores the relationships among consumers' perceptions about online security, including WASSs awareness, importance of WASS, privacy concerns, security concerns, and information quality, before and after the educational intervention. The study finds that educating consumers about the security and privacy dangers of the web, as well as the role of web assurance seals, does increase their awareness and perceived importance of the seals. However, despite this increased awareness, there is little association between these assurance seals and the two indicators of trustworthiness, concerns about privacy and perceived information quality, of an e-commerce site, even after the intervention. Only security concerns have a statistically significant relationship with WASSs awareness before and after the educational intervention. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
Given the large investments in Enterprise Social Media technologies in organizational settings, this paper sets out to explore the challenges and opportunities that ESM technologies provide for ...organizational communication. Merging existing conceptual work on ESM with findings from thirteen appreciative interviews with professionals from a large multinational organization, our papers offers six areas of opportunities and challenges -- Social Capital Formation, Boundary Work, Attention Allocation, Social Analytics, Adoption and Use Incentives, and Governance and Control -- that could guide researchers and practitioners in understanding and informing the use of social media technologies in their most productive and impactful ways.
This study explores how some uses of ICTs, as well as having social capital and other means of access to knowledge resources, are related to company performance in a knowledge-intensive business ...cluster. Data were collected through a survey of companies in the Medicon Valley biotech region located in Denmark and Southern Sweden. Responding companies included established producers of biotechnology-related products as well as small biotechnology start-up firms emphasizing research and development. The results suggest that when ICT use was aimed at accessing and enhancing human and intellectual capital, such as use of online databases for recruitment, intranets to enhance employee access to information and education, and collaborative tools to connect with off-premise researchers, companies reported better performance outcomes. Social capital in the form of connections to people who can provide access to information and opportunity predicted company performance, particularly for small start-up companies. The pattern of results complements prior work that establishes the importance of social capital in regional business clusters by demonstrating how certain ICT uses complement personal relationships to enhance the likelihood of success among companies in the region.
This study assesses whether Facebook users have different ‘connection strategies,’ a term which describes a suite of Facebook-related relational communication activities, and explores the ...relationship between these connection strategies and social capital. Survey data (N = 450) from a random sample of undergraduate students reveal that only social information-seeking behaviors contribute to perceptions of social capital; connection strategies that focus on strangers or close friends do not. We also find that reporting more ‘actual’ friends on the site is predictive of social capital, but only to a point. We believe the explanation for these findings may be that the identity information in Facebook serves as a social lubricant, encouraging individuals to convert latent to weak ties and enabling them to broadcast requests for support or information.
Many traditional brick-and-mortar businesses supplement their physical outlets with e-commerce capabilities on the Web, but there has been little empirical research on the underlying dynamics of the ..."click-and-mortar" business approach. This paper develops a conceptual framework that highlights the four types of synergies obtained by integrating e-commerce with physical infrastructures: cost savings, improved differentiation, enhanced trust, and market extension. Case studies of click-and-mortar enterprises provide concrete examples ofthese synergybenefits and ofthe managerial actions needed to prevent channel conflicts.
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