Social Media Mashups: The Ordering and Disordering Role of Social Media Technologies in Organizations

• In Event: B.E.S.T.: Networks and Social Media

Abstract

Social media technologies (SMTs) are changing the ways in which organizations accomplish work tasks, such as recruitment, mobilization, and coordination. Increasingly, material features of SMTs allow their users to use SMTs in conjunction, thereby impacting social and material relations with so far unexplored consequences for organizing processes. For a rich understanding, this study draws on socio-materiality theory and ethnographic methods to investigate the hybrid use of multiple SMTs in two organizations. The contributions of the study are twofold: Firstly, the findings detect socio-material practices of cross-association (‘exporting’ data across platforms) and cross-integration (‘importing’ content across technologies) that are specific to hybrid SMTs use. Such practices make disconnected and mutable interactions from multiple and disparate locales to merge into communicative events (i.e., mashups). Secondly, the findings show that mashups develop ordering and disordering agency as these are used by human and non-human agents (hashtags, trolls, bots and algorithms) in an interconnected manner. This study advances organizational research by providing analytical and methodological insights concerning how SMTs introduce interconnected and hybrid forms of organizing in which multiple actors are tied together.

Authors

• Oana Brindusa Albu, University of Southern Denmark

• Michael Andreas Etter, Copenhagen Business School