PurposeThis study focuses on managers' perceptions of employees' communicative role in social media, and explores the changes in the contractual nature of employment relations in mediatized workplaces in which the boundaries of professional and private life are becoming more fluid.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative approach was employed to explore this relatively new phenomenon. The data, comprising 24 interviews with managers responsible for corporate communication and human resources in knowledge-intensive organizations, was thematically analysed.FindingsThe analysis shows that employees' work-related social media use creates new types of exchanges and dependencies between an organization and individual employees, which relate to employees' representation, knowledge and networks.Originality/valueThe study is among the first to examine the exchanges and dependencies in an employment relationship that emerge from increased use of social media for professional purposes.
This paper examines the evolution of strategy narration, contributing to ongoing discussions in this field. Our empirical data, gathered from a large Finnish cooperative bank, cover three decades. According to our findings, digitalisation has brought about an epoch change in strategy narration, as top management has strongly adopted digital media in their leadership work, which has replaced 'traditional' face-to-face strategy meetings and public presentations by gatherings on digital platforms, including webcasting, intranet and Skype. This has brought about a leadership vacuum, and left organisational members long for their superiors to 'exercise' some traditional leadership practices, such as caring and presence, both calling for face-to-face interaction. Thus, leadership roles, in terms of human-to-human interaction, seem to still be desired, and digitalisation has not entirely replaced the importance of the presence of an embodied leader. In our data, the leaders did not resort to intentional fabrication of alternative facts in the post-truth sense, but rather fantasising in the sense that strategising always involves fictional narration without a reference to historical facts as it relates to forthcoming events. Due to this, the post-truth framework of alternative facts and intentional truth bending does not entirely fit in describing strategy narration in business context. However, increasingly digital plurivocal narration with several participants is likely to result in multiple organisational 'truths'. Therefore, dealing with such ambiguity and the exercise of leadership power requires leaders' awareness of the flux of quickly evolving digital organisational storytelling.
Advancements in digital communication technologies, such as social media, have transformed how individuals can interact inside and outside their organizations and participate in professional life. This qualitative study focuses on inclusion in the increasingly digitalized and interactive workplace. It adopts a managerial perspective and explores whether organizational members are perceived to have equal opportunities to participate and contribute in this novel environment. The research data consists of interviews with 24 managers in seven knowledge‐based organizations. The results show that both individual and organizational factors may become sources of inequality related to digital participation. The findings also emphasize that organizations have an important role in facilitating workers' digital inclusion. The paper contributes to the human resource management and digital inclusion literature and provides important managerial insights for organizations operating in the knowledge sector in particular.
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