Open AccessSocial media affordances and governance in the workplace: An examination of organizational policies
Author(s) -
Vaast Emmanuelle,
Kaganer Evgeny
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of computer‐mediated communication
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.15
H-Index - 119
ISSN - 1083-6101
DOI - 10.1111/jcc4.12032
Subject(s) - affordance , social media , visibility , corporate governance , action (physics) , public relations , business , sociology , psychology , political science , finance , law , cognitive psychology , physics , optics , quantum mechanics
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 .