This paper examines how organizations perceive affordances of social media and how they react to their employees' use of social media through policies, a key means of organizational governance. Existing literature identified 4 affordances -visibility, persistence, editability, and association (between people and between people and information) -as action potentials of social media in organizations. Content analysis of a sample of organizational social media policies reveals that organizations especially reacted to the affordances of visibility and persistence much more than to the affordance of editability. It also discovers a third type of association (between employees and organization). It shows how organizations' reactions to social media evolved from being solely concerned with risk management to also considering its value-generating potential.Key words: Social media, affordances, policies, governance, Web 2.0, visibility, persistence, editability, association.doi:10.1111/jcc4.12032 IntroductionSocial media, enabled by powerful, easily accessible and user-friendly Information Technology (IT) applications, have spread across organizations in all industries (Bernoff & Schadler, 2010;Curtis et al., 2010;Stolley, 2009). Social media have pervaded many aspects of organizing, and have generated new ways of connecting with customers, collaborating, and innovating (Cisco, 2010;Dunn, 2010;Wilson, Guinan, Parise, & Weinberg, 2011). Social media are ''Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content'' (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). Common social media include blogs, microblogs, social networking sites, wikis, and video-or content-sharing sites (Piskorki & McCall, 2010; Vaast, Davidson, & Mattson, forth coming).Social media present simultaneously opportunities and challenges for organizations. With social media, employees can mobilize resources, implement, and test out new ideas quickly and in a bottom-up fashion (Vaast, 2010). This offers an opportunity to make organizations more agile and responsive to the demands of customers, who today are also equipped with powerful social media Gallaugher & Ransbotham, 2010). Management, however, faces a number of challenges as it stands to lose some of its traditional control over what IT initiatives and applications are being implemented and used in the organization (Kane, Fichman, Gallaugher, & Glaser, 2009;Safko & Brake, 2009;Stolley, 2009). Indeed, employees, rather than formal business or IT leadership, frequently spearhead social media initiatives (Treem & Leonardi, 2012;Vaast, 2010).Employee use of social media may thus have diverse impacts upon organizations, both internally (e.g. related to culture, innovation processes; McAfee, 2006) as well as externally (e.g. what organizational image employees might project on public social networking sites; Kane et al., 2009). Organizations, on their part, might seek to encourage certain uses of social media and limi...
Despite the pervasiveness and high costs of burnout in IT, our understanding of this problem remains limited. Review of IS research on job stress/burnout reveals that this body of work has relied heavily on general OB theory (parsimonious models generalizable across a variety of occupations and social contexts). More recently, scholars have argued for the addition of an occupation-specific approach to complement general OB theory, incorporating factors and concerns particular to a profession/work environment to increase explanatory power and relevance. The purpose of the exploratory study in this paper is to provide a foundation for such an occupation-specific research agenda on burnout in the IT profession. As an initial step, we employ social representations theory and methods to understand how IT professionals today make sense of and assign meaning to burnout in the context of their work. Transcripts from in-depth interviews of 20 IT professionals were contentanalyzed and 22 key topics (concepts) were identified. Quantitative methods, including analysis of similarity, were used to create a social representations 'map' reflecting these professionals' views of burnout. The study contributes to the development of a renewed research agenda by pinpointing highly salient issues and specific work contexts warranting priority in future investigations.
Tablets offer hope for improving learning and collaboration but only if truly integrated into learning settings.
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