Social platformsSOCIAL PLATFORMS

Associate professor Lene Pettersen, October 8. 2019

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Today’s menu• What is theory?

• ABC about social platforms

• Case:

– A multinational organization using a social enterprise platform for

different strategic purposes

– How structuration theory and Giddens thinking about modernity

explains the findings.

• An explanation of how and why things are related.

4

WHAT IS A THEORY?

• To think clearly and show how we have been thinking in our

research.

• To ask research questions.

• To answer research questions.

• To reason and justify research questions.

• To become good explorers.

5

WHAT DO WE USE THEORY FOR?

• Theory-driven: We use theory to explore our data

(deductive).

• Data-driven: We follow the data and explore theory

(inductive).

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TWO TYPES OF ANALYSIS

METHODOLOGY

THEORY

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• Two-sidedness: The platform or the business model?

• Functionality we know from «web 2.0».

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SOCIAL PLATFORMS

• Two-sidedness: The platform or the business model?

• Functionality we know from «web 2.0».

• Vary in terms of functionality, as well as the user’s

connecting strategies.

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SOCIAL PLATFORMS

12

• Synchronous

• Maintaining social

relationships

• Strong link between

online and offline

interactions (boyd,

2009)(Chatora,

2010)(Ellison,

Steinfield, & Lampe,

2011)(Subrahmanyam,

Reich, Waechter, &

Espinoza, 2008).

• Asynchronous

• Creating new social

relationships

• Low reciprocity

(20%) (Wu, Hofman,

Mason, & Watts,

2011)

Social platforms

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• Synchronous

• Maintaining social

relationships

• Strong link between

online and offline

interactions (boyd,

2009)(Chatora,

2010)(Ellison,

Steinfield, & Lampe,

2011)(Subrahmanyam,

Reich, Waechter, &

Espinoza, 2008).

• Asynchronous

• Creating new social

relationships

• Low reciprocity

(20%) (Wu, Hofman,

Mason, & Watts,

2011)

• Organizations introduce social enterprise media

(e.g. Yammer, SharePoint, Jive) to increase

collaboration and knowledge sharing processes

and connections among employees at different

geographical location that do not know each other

in person (Chui, Dewhurst, & Pollak, 2013; Cook,

2008; McAfee, 2009).

Social platforms

14

• Synchronous

• Maintaining social

relationships

• Strong link between

online and offline

interactions (boyd,

2009)(Chatora,

2010)(Ellison,

Steinfield, & Lampe,

2011)(Subrahmanyam,

Reich, Waechter, &

Espinoza, 2008).

• Asynchronous

• Creating new social

relationships

• Low reciprocity

(20%) (Wu, Hofman,

Mason, & Watts,

2011)

• A consistent tendency to connect with

those colleagues employees already know

rather than creating new relationships

(Steinfield, DiMicco, Ellison, & Lampe,

2009).

Social platforms

CASE

RQ: What role does

geographical location play

in affecting co-presence in

online spaces?

The case studied

• A French listed medium-to-large multinational, knowledge-intensive. consultancy organization, anonymized as Tech Business Company (TBC),

• Employs five thousand consultants (listed as ‘knowledge-workers’ in the literature).

• Entities in more than twenty countries in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

• Introduced a global social enterprise platform (Jive Business Software version 4.5.2) in 2010–2011 in order for employees to– “build professional networks, develop competence by following others more

skilled, finding out what others are doing and not reinventing the wheel, having things you’re working on easy to find and share, easily work with colleagues in other business units” (from TBC’s implementation strategy).

• 27 in-depth interviews

in six entities in four

countries in 2011

together with Marika

Lüders

• social network analysis of

off-line collaboration

tendencies

• pilot study in

Norway 2010

• participatory

observations in

Copenhagen and the

UK

• close analysis of the platforms’

functionality, overall strategy,

user patterns, engagement

within the platform, selected

content (blog post, comments),

statistics (traffic, page views,

user profiles )

• self-perceived ICT-

competence

• field studies in

Norway and Morocco in

2011 and repeated

in 2012

• close analysis of the 27

participators social platform

use, in particular the ‘Following’

and ‘Group’ functionality in the

software

• key informant

methodology

• close analysis of the

participator’s social capital

(numbers of connections) in

Facebook, LinkedIn) and @work

offline-connections

Mixed Methodology

Me entering the field (the outsourcing unit in Morocco)

• The analysis found that knowledge work at TBC differs in

three regards:

• (1) Where work takes place (spatiality);

• (2) How the workday is organised in clock time and

week/calendar days (temporality); and

• (3) the degree of co-presence in working relationships.

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SOME OF THE

1.Where work takes place

The social network data regarding who TBC

professionals address when seeking work help –

and who seeks them – suggests there is little cross-

unit collaboration across the 20+ entities in TBC,

even when located within the same country or city;

…. 6 DIFFERENT CONTEXTS FOR WHERE WORK IS DONE …

INHOUSERSOUTHOUSERSOVERLAPPERS

TELE-

WORKERS

DISTANT

WORKERSNOMADS

THE OFFICE AT THE CLIENTS

ENTITIES

SOMEWHERE

ELSKE

FROM

HOME

DIFFERENT

COUNTRYFROM

EVERYWHERE

FIXED SITE

TELE-WORKERS

AT THE CLIENTS

Gaining knowledge from people sitting physically

close

«I get much of what I need through the people I

work with because this is knowledge the client and

their two suppliers that we work with have, and

now [name of another consultancy firm] are also

working on it.» (Male, 40+ Oslo)

• The physical architecture: entrance, identity, signs, office landscape, room, floors.

• Sitting at the same desk in the same physical place day after day, often leaving symbols behind when leaving work.

• Conversing in their native language during the workday.

• Approach others they are located close to, and that they know and trust when in need for work-assistance.

• Sitting close to others important for their work.

• Choose communication spaces that are closed, smaller and personal (telephone, email, F2F, coffee machine).

SITTING CLOSE TO FAMILIAR AND RELEVANT OTHERS

«It tends to be a locational thing. The people that literally sits

near me». Male, 40+, UK.

OFFLIN

E

How one communicates in groups in the online

platform at work depends on the audience:

“It depends on the group. We have a closed group for us

here at the office, and we have a group for those working

with [given topic] in Europe. They are very different

settings. The office group has a funny name, and it is

something totally different when I’m going to speak with

people I sort of do not know at all. One puts on a

seriousness filter in some of the online spaces. (Male,

40+, Norway)”

«I feel closer to the project at the moment than the office.

[The office] is not my place of work really, it’s just a place I

come occasionally. I’ve spent far more time in customer

sites than in this office».

Female, 30+ UK

2.How the workday is organisedTeleworker’s workingday

«I tend to start work at about half past seven in the morning.

I’ll read my emails, work out if there’s anything urgent that

needs doing immediately. And I manage most of my to-do

list in a mixture of Outlook and a spread sheet. So I sort of

consult those and decide what I need to do urgently. I tend

to be most productive from about half past seven in the

morning up to lunch time. So I try to get the most important

things that require a lot of thinking, and then I can focus on

maybe other things in the afternoon. I work until sometimes

seven in the evening». (Male, 50+, UK)

INHOUSERSOUTHOUSERSOVERLAPPERS

TELE-

WORKERS

DISTANT

WORKERSNOMADS

THE OFFICE AT THE CLIENTS

ENTITIES

SOMEWHERE

ELSKE

FROM

HOME

DIFFERENT

COUNTRYFROM

EVERYWHERE

FIXED SITE

TELE-WORKERS

AT THE CLIENTS

3.Degree of co-presence in working relationships

The teleworker work closely with colleagues:

«Every day at 9:30, we have a call for half an hour where we

catch up and, you know, anyone that’s got anything. Often,

someone needs to discuss something with a particular

person, and if they can’t resolve it in a couple of minutes,

then we’ll take it and have a call afterwards. We have a

continuous Skype joint chat running, so if anyone wants to

ask anything, we’re always on Skype. But we keep this daily

chat as a separate area so we can effectively say what we

want. And also, it does get some social chat, non-work chat,

on it as well» (Male, 50+, UK)

Distant workers, however;

«They are providing us documentation, but they are the

ones that develop the application, and they will therefore

know more than we do, so we need additional information

because they have information we don’t have. They are

very knowledgeable, and they are always providing

additional information that we could not know of since they

are the ones that develop the applications. On the surface

level, we know the application, but then there is a deeper

level in which we need some documentation so we can

understand the problem» (Male, 20+, Morocco)

Distant workers

• Work with tasks that is outsourced to them from other

entities and countries.

• No social relation with the persons involved in the problem

in which they shall solve and never been part of their social

structure.

• Some explain that they wish they knew these others more

personally:

«It would be interesting to collaborate together because

we don’t really interact. By collaboration, I mean

collaboration as get there with the team, have trainings

together, to be more human in the collaboration.

Technology can do the job to a certain point. We can do it

through Skype, the social enterprise platform, or for any

means of communication. We can communicate about

everything, but we do not know the person on the other

side of the computers, so I don’t know his profile, his

personality, and how they interpret what I am saying.»

(Male, 20+, Morocco)

Distant workers:

It is important to meet physically because

«You get much more comfortable when you know the

person you are communicating with».

(Male, 20+, Morocco)

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PROBLEMS

WELL DEFINED

PROBLEMS LESS

WELL DEFINED

WORK TASKS’

COMPLEXITY

NEED FOR OTHER

PEOPLE AND ORAL

COMMUNICATION

TECHNICAL WORKERS

PROCESS WORKERS

(Brinkley et al., 2009)

Lets stop here and add

a theorethical lens to

the findings.

35

I

STRUCTURATION THEORY

Anthony Giddens

Loud discussions in the social sciences were going on about

the structure-actor dilemma:

How we act is

decided by the

social system!!

No way! We are not

passive beings

without a will to act on

our own!

You are both wrong.

Its is not either or,

both matters equally

much.

Anthony Giddens,

uniting two schools

of human thoughts

with his structuration

theory.

- Structuration = relations that was created in a specific

structure can exist across time and place, independent

from the context it once was established (Giddens,

1979; 1984).

- Social structure is dual (actor-structure).

ISTRUCTURATION THEORY

ActorStructure

Social structure is both a medium and an outcome.

- Personal trust is created among the

actors in their daily environments.

- Daily routines is key for social integration

between people and structures.

- To Giddens, ‘Space’ is related to ‘time’,

not clock time but….

STRUCTURATION THEORY

I

- But to co-presence (being together here and now in a shared context (place)

- ‘Space’ points to the importance of face-to-face interaction for meaningful

and turn-taking in conversations that takes place in everyday language and

environments.

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GIDDENS’ THEORIZING ON ‘MODERNITY’

• With the development of modern society, social interaction,

meaning and ontological safety was removed from time-space

(Giddens, 1990; Giddens and Pierson, 1998).

• The modern society is characterized by:

– Detachment of time-place

• Social relations are «lifted out» from their local contexts, and to an abstract or

online global space that is characterized by anomie (lack of norms)

• Disembedding mechanisms.

– Elements can be moved around without specific properties or

characteristics with the individual (e.g. english as a lingua franca,

money).

I I

• The norms and rules for usage and conversations that should

be followed in the online space differ from one organizational

context to another.

• The offline norms and rules triumph over online interactions.

• The social enterprise platform and online interaction does not

include the wider social contexts that interactions are part of

– misunderstandings, prejudices of others, sanctions.

RULES AT PLAY OFFLINE ARE LIFTED INTO LOCAL ONLINE SPACES

OFFLIN

E -

ON

LIN

E

CONCLUDING REMARKS

OfflineOnline

CONCLUDING REMARKS

• Offline and online are complementary

• Social relationships are not lifted out from the context in

which it once was established, creating anomie or a lingua

franca as Giddens fears.

• On the contrary, relationships, practices and norms are lifted

in - creating local villages due to a global interconnected

structure

– This is due to structuration processes taking place.

• This suggests that social platforms have a great potential to

expand existing social relationships

ACTOR

STRUCTURE

• Shared geographical place provides a space where employees

learn each other practices and nurtures trustful and predictable

relations

• Geographical distance means distance in social structures.

• Distant workers are not «lifted into» the other offices’ or clients’

social structures, on the contrary, the problem they shall solve is

lifted out – detached from – the context in which it was established

and is part of.

• This is not unproblematic, and misunderstandings and conflicts

easily occurs due to the lack of a shared communication ground –

or co-presence.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

• Structuration processes

• Modernity = Detachment of social relations

THUS, WE CAN CONTRIBUTE TO THE CHOSEN THEORY

• Structuration processes

• Disembedded mechanisms

THUS, WE CAN CONTRIBUTE TO THE USED THEORY

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