| Description |
Ever since its emergence in the early 2000s, social media has been subject to a multitude of interpretations. One of these is as purveyor of participatory culture. Yet, when it comes to how organizations use social media to interact with various digital stakeholders and what, if any, impact this interaction has on organizing, academics and practitioners alike still poorly understand participation. This dissertation is a qualitative study of the impact organization-stakeholder social media interaction has on organizing, and the co-construction and presentification of organizational identity. Through in-depth interviews, meeting observations, and document analysis, I engage with 21 organizations and their representatives to understand how interactions with stakeholders on social media communicatively constitute organizational practices around identity, decision-making, and strategy. Using general organizational identity theory and the Montreal School Approach to the communication constitutive of organizing field of inquiry, I explain how organizational identity and presentification are co-constructed through conversations on social media platforms. Further, I show that stakeholders of various interests participate in the communicative constitution of the organizations they engage with on social media. This is achieved through the role of the identity hub, or social media professional, who acts as an interpreter of conversations and intermediary texts, scaling up the organization. I focus particularly on the identity confirming and disconfirming messages virtual communities share with the organizations online and the effect of these messages on sensemaking, knowing, and resulting organizational identity statements. I look at how social media conversations laminate into organizational practices of decisions-making, strategic representation and ultimately, identity. The imbrication of conversations on and about social media platforms into organizational texts represents the final co-constructive step I engage, toward the social organization-discursive entity constituted by stakeholders and organizational members alike. |
