Social Networking Platform Usage in Intra-organizational Communication
In the short time in which social network platforms have been adopted in organizational contexts, they have been used in two primary ways. The first, and more commonly studied, way is for organizational communication with external parties, such as customers, vendors, and the public. Most organizations that use social networking applications to communicate with external parties have a multipronged strategy that crosses various platforms. For example, they maintain pages on popular public social networking sites like Facebook, and they broadcast messages on microblogging sites such as Twitter. Their employees also sometimes write blogs on news websites and, occasionally, they host social tagging sites. Communication on these sites is faced externally. The second and less commonly studied way in which organizations have employed social networking applications is for internal communication and social interaction within the organization. To date, most studies of social networking applications for internal communication have been conducted by scholars within the computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human computer-interaction (HCI) communities. These studies in CSCW and HCI have focused on special issues in social networking application use for organizational action and can be categorized into three types.
The first type of study emphasized the usage practice of a new medium (email, IM, wiki, social tagging system, blog, microblog, etc) in workplace. These studies usually combined participant observation, and content analysis (both quantitative and qualitative), and quantitative surveys as research method.
Participant observation, which was used in to examine how a particular medium was adopted and used by an organization, has been defined as a research method that involves participating in people’s daily lives over a period of time, observing, asking questions, taking notes and collecting other forms of data (O’Reilly, 2005). Similar to ethnography, participant observation is deemed the centerpiece of ethnographic research, because it avoids the artificiality of controlled experiments and the unnatural setting of surveys and allows access to first hand data that may be otherwise unobtainable (Kozinets, 2010; Murchison, 2010). Participant observers in ethnography can adopt four different roles: covert observer, overt observer, covert participant, and overt participant (i.e., true participant observer) (Schutt, 2006). As a covert observer, the ethnographer seeks to observe things as they are without participating and disclosing her/his role as an ethnographer. In contrast, the overt observer announces her/his role as an ethnographer. The covert participant acts like the people under study without identifying her/his role as an ethnographer, while the overt participant announces her/his research role and participates in group activities. The presence of overt observers or overt participants might alter the behavior of people under study. Participants can have the opportunity to experience others’ lives and learn from their points of view, but may take the risk of becoming native and losing objectivity. Observers can have enough time to record what happens and stay objective and scientific, but may fail to gain the insider’s view. Which role to adopt depends on the research topic, the ethnographer’s personality and background, the nature of the field, and ethical concerns (Murchison, 2010; Schutt, 2006). The ethnographer’s role may not necessarily remain fixed during an ethnographic study, but may change depending on the situations (O’Reilly, 2005). The participant observers in those studies mentioned above are either developers of certain platform (e.g., Yammer, one corporation-oriented social networking site) or research team members from the studying organization (e.g., IBM or Microsoft research center) thus have the convenience to serve as covert observer to minimize their influence to people under study. Although those researchers aimed at studying the usage practice of internet-based mediums, they didn’t conduct participation and observation using auto-netnographic approach, ranging from “reading messages regularly and in real time, following links, rating, replying to other members via e-mail or other one-on-one communications, offering short comments…contributing to community activities, to becoming an organizer, expert, or recognized voice of the community” (Kozinets, 2010, p. 96). Because of the research topics, they are not interested in being a real community member and recording and analyzing their own online experiences, which is the advantage of auto-netnographic approach, but preferred to take the content analytic approach lurking around an online setting to ensure their studies are unobtrusive.
Content analysis, which was used by those studies mentioned above to analyze posts and field notes to develop themes for specific research questions, has been defined as a technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts to the contexts of their use (Krippendorff, 2004). Content analysis can be classified into latent (subjective and qualitative) and manifest (objective and quantitative) (Babbie, 2007). Early content analysis was objective and generated quantitative summaries and enumerations of manifest content, but qualitative and latent analysis have found greater acceptance over time. Because those studies aimed at using post and field note content to emerge in the process of a researcher analyzing a text relative to a particular context (Krippendorff, 2004), they all used interpretive, relatively subjective, and less rigid approach to code the latent content, which is also indicator of contexts, discourses, or purposes, and to understand the underlying meaning.
The second type of study focused on specific aspects of media use, such as motivations or barriers. A related, but distinct, third type of study examined social networking applications, as organizational tools, for facilitating individual career advancement and managing communication and collaboration. These two types of study mainly used qualitative semi-structured interview method to collect data and then coded all of the interviews to identify major themes for each research question. Qualitative interviewing is a research method aims at understanding people’s points of view, experiences, thoughts, and feelings with the purpose of producing knowledge (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009). According to Rubin and Rubin (1995), qualitative interviewing has three unique characteristics that distinguish it from other methods of data collection. First, qualitative interviews are modifications or extensions of ordinary conversations, but with important distinctions. Second, qualitative interviews are more interested in the understanding, knowledge, and insights of the interviewees than in categorizing people or events in terms of academic theories. Third, the content of the interview, as well as the flow and choice of topics changes to match what the individual interviewee knows and feels.
Qualitative interviews can be categorized into semi-structured interviews and unstructured interviews depending on the degree of structure (Blee & Taylor, 2002). In unstructured interviews, without giving specific questions the researchers let the interviewee to direct the flow of conversation and introduce and structure the problem in her/his own words corresponding to the broad issues raised by the interviewer. In semi-structured interviews, the researchers create an interview instrument consisting of a list of questions before interviewing, which allows the flexibility to change the order of questions, ask follow-up questions, seek clarifications, and add extra questions during the interview. The researchers are supposed to play a more active role in leading semi-structured interviews than in unstructured interviews. The purposes of semi-structured interviews are to explore, discover, and interpret the meaning of phenomena. Compared to unstructured interviews, semi-structured interviews can ensure the research questions to be addressed. The researchers could retain the flexibility to ask follow-up questions developed from content analysis or participant observations, seek clarifications, obtain explanations and background information, and tailor the interview guide to different interviewees (Murchison, 2010). Most studies mentioned above employed semi-structured interviews because 1) they have done previous studies using other research methods to develop interview instruments which include a list of specific, pre-determined questions; 2) they aimed at acquiring the same type of information from participants so can help to organize information more systematically and quickly; 3) the researchers preferred some flexibility in the process of collecting data.
References:
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