Using Social Media for Organizational Resilience: Alumni Relations Across the Life Span of Identification-Disruptive Events

• In Event: Social Media Communications in Critical Situations

Abstract

The specific focus of this project is on university alumni relations offices’ use of social media to restore organizational identification and establish organizational resilience during identification-disruptive events. According to Buzzanell (2010), constructing resilience is a process of reintegrating from disruptions in life, which, she hypothesizes, consists of five primary communication processes: crafting normalcy, affirming identity anchors, maintaining and using communication networks, putting alternative logics to work, and legitimizing negative feelings while foregrounding productive action. This study will build upon this theoretical work by conducting interviews with alumni directors and discourse analyses of critical periods of social media use to provide empirical evidence of those social media practices that build/maintain identification and those that construct resilience. When universities and colleges undergo significant changes, become embroiled in scandal, or lose prestige, alumni may distance themselves from their alma mater and experience disidentification, or the separation of personal identity from organizational identity (Elsbach & Bhattacharya, 2001). Therefore, this project seeks to understand how, when changes occur that threaten alumni’s organizational identification, institutions use social media to construct resilience.

Author

• Anna Wiederhold Wolfe, University of Nevada, Reno