It's not just organizations that don't get social media

Dr James (Jim) Slevin

on organizations and social media

Lecture 1 of 7

• Lector organizations and social media at MEMTEC Stenden.• University Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.• Senior member of King’s College, Cambridge.

Jim’s affiliations:

Facebook group: Lectorate Organizations and Social Media

• Self-study course.• Weekly readings.• Seven lectures.• Exam (4 open questions - with three

sub-questions each) covering readings and lectures.

• Readings and lecture slides available online.

Notes on this course

Reading for this week

• Kaplan, A.M. and Haenlein, M. (2010) Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities

of Social Media. Business Horizons, 53, 59-68.

• Kietzmann, J.H., Herkens, K., McCarthy, I.P. and

Silvestre, B. (2011) Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of

social media. Business Horizons, 54, 241-251.

a term first used in 1923:‘Mass-Media’

>< contrasts with:

‘Social Media’:a term first used in 2004

Social mediaSender/Receiver Sender/Receiver

Mass-mediaSender Receiver

Theodore Puskás

Introduced a telephonenews servicein 1887

“Mass”-media using electric technology exist well before 1923

Max Horkheimer and Theodor AdornoCritized for

treating recipients as a passive “mass”

Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944)

Made by people and used by people, the mass-media are inherently social

Social media exist well before 2004

1999

Homepages(& guestbooks etc.)

1993

Unix Talk1983

Virtual community 1985

BBS/Newsgroups

1973

1988

Social media involve a variety of interactional arrangements

• Face-to-face.• Mediated interaction.• Mediated quasi-interaction.

All media are social. What matters is the degree of sociability that they allow for.

In spite of there being a glut of experts, social media are not that well understood

Some of the reasons given why social media are not well understood

• Research cannot keep up with the pace of change.

• Inexperienced researchers.• Excesses of futurology.• Public anxiety.• Commercial interests.• Complexity of networked challenges.

However, the reasons why we have such a poor understanding of social media run much deeper than this!

What do you see?

• It’s impossible to isolate a hypothesis from the theoretical frameworks in which observations are grounded.

• Observations always relate to a specific paradigm.

• A paradigm is a logically consistent view of the world.

Thomas Kuhn (1922 -1996)

James Beniger recognizes many paradigms regarding new communication technologies and their social impact

“The Control Revolution” (1986)

• “Organizational Revolution” Boulding (1953)

• “Knowledge economy” Machlup (1962)

• “Global Village” McLuhan (1964)

• “Postmodern Society” Etzioni (1968)

• “Postindustrial society” Touraine (1971)

• “Posttraditional Society” Eisenstadt (1972)

• “Communications Age” Phillips (1975)

• “Wired Society” Martin (1978)

• “Computer Age” Dertouzos (1979)

• “Third Wave” Toffle (1980)

• “Information Society” Martin (1981)

• “Information Age” Dizard (1982)

For a deeper understanding we must consider a social theory of organizations and social media

Social theory concerns concepts and frameworks that can be placed in the service of empirical understanding in all

social sciences.

Organizations Technology

Practice

Society

Kaplan & Kietzmann: two articles aiming to deliver concepts and frameworks for understanding organizations and social media

Strengths: recognize the importance of social theory in understanding organizations and social media.

Weaknesses: five problems undermine the explanatory power of the concepts and frameworks which they suggest.

Let’s now look at each of the five problems in turn...

First, social media are approached as a sudden invention in the form of Web 2.0

• Only briefly mention that social media development has a history.

• Move swiftly on to treat social media as a sudden invention in the form of Web 2.0.

What Kaplan & Kietzmann do:

Tim Berners-Lee

“Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along....”

• Explanatory power of Web 2.0 as a concept is very weak.

• It isolates social media from the wealth of understanding we have of modern communication technologies, the conditions of their development and impact.

However:

Second, 'social presence' and 'media richness theory' are used in a deterministic fashion

What Kaplan & Haenlein do:

face to face interactions social media interactions

degree of social presence

+ -degree of media richness

+ -

However:

Gerardine DeSanctis

“... richer media (such as face-to-face meetings) are not necessarily preferable or more effective than leaner electronic media.”

• Social media do not feature as a ‘magic bullets’ all on their own.

Third, no attempt is made to properly theorize the connection between organizations and social media

What Kaplan & Haenlein do:• Draw uncritically on Erving Goffman’s work

on social processes, self-disclosure & presentation.

However:

Anthony Giddens

“Goffman's sociology... has not developed an account of institutions... Institutions appear as unexplained parameters within which actors organize their practical activities.”

• Treating organizational arrangements as a mere backdrop allows for the substitution of simplistic and arbitrary frameworks to describe organizational structure.

• It ignores the investigation of motivation underpinning agents’ use of social media.

• It limits what can be said about the intended and unintended organizational consequences of social media use.

• It paves the path for the honeycomb framework in the Kietzmann article.

Fourth, proposes a descriptive biological parallel to balance functionalities and configure social media to meet business needs

What Kietzmann et al. do:• They claim that to study organizations

and social media is simply like studying the structure of a honeycomb.

However:

Anthony Giddens

Biological analogies used in this way introduce a “... teleological quality... social items or activities are held to exist because they meet functional needs.”

• Contributions of bloggers to the study cannot be adequately grasped in terms of a set of hexagonal cells built by bees in their nests.

• Bloggers' purposes and reasons have been replaced by emergent functionalities that have been ordered arbitrarily into a honeycomb pattern.

• It's misleading to suggest that you can take a snapshot, as one can of a honeycomb, and then use it to understand the dynamics of social media outcomes that occur over time.

Fifth, the concepts and frameworks give rise to difficulties in understanding organizations and social media practice

• How are collaborative projects using social media inherently democratic?

• What understanding can then be gained from classifying blogs in a general fashion as being low in media richness?

• Involving disparate media formats, what purpose can it serve to place Facebook in a general scheme?

• Why do virtual game worlds provide for the highest level of social presence and media richness?

• In what way can life in virtual social worlds ever be similar to real life?

• Is it really possible to claim that Linkedin is configured around 'identity' and Facebook around 'relationships'?

• How can such theoretical insights help organizations choose the right medium, to develop strategies for monitoring, understanding and responding to different social media activities?

Questioning the explanatory power of Kaplan & Kietzmann:

Some markers for the further conceptual development of the study of organizations and social media

1. engage with a richer vein of ideas than those encompassed by the 'Web 2.0' discourse.

2. seek to understand ways in which social media use transforms the nature of organizational interaction.

3. attend critically to the conceptualization of new organizational forms.

4. abandon the architecture of a honeycomb and approach the structured properties of organizations and social media as “...simultaneously the medium and outcome of social acts...” (Giddens).

5. continue to couple a concern with the developments in social theory of organizations and social media to a concern with organizations and social media practice.

We must:

Study questions

• What are Kaplan & Kietzmann et al. trying to do and

do they achieve this in your view?

• What are the strengths of both articles?

• What are the weaknesses of both articles?

• Inventorize extensively what you consider needs to

be done in order for theory and concepts to enrich

empirical understanding of organizations and social

media?

It's not just organizations that don't get social media

Dr James (Jim) Slevin

on organizations and social media

Lecture 1 of 7