The widespread adoption and use of social media in almost every aspect of our daily lives may outpace existingempirical understandings. In organizations, social media are increasingly used by professional individualsand communities to support dynamic collaboration and knowledge sharing. While there is a growing amountof research on this subject, still little is known on how people use different kinds of social media in practice.That is, there is a need for an empirical understanding that addresses actual use practices of social mediawithin the formal boundaries of organizations. To this end, we report on results from a qualitative comparativestudy of the use of wikis at two global organizations. Our aim is to develop an empirical understandingof the enactment of structures and the ways by which people structure and organize their wiki use practicesby drawing on Orlikowski’s (2000) practice lens. The findings from the authors analysis suggest a number ofenacted structures that reflect diverse wiki use practices. The main contribution centers on developing threekey mechanisms that provide means for understanding the structuring of the use of technology.

The evolution of social media has introduced novel possibilities for work and interaction in organizations. The wiki technology is one important kind of social media technologies that is increasingly used to facilitate the creation and sharing of organizational knowledge within communities. Given the increasing use of social media in organizations and the lack of knowledge on their consequences for organizing, we use an affordance lens to explore the enactment of organizational wiki affordances. Using qualitative data obtained through interviews, field visits, and documents from two multinational organizations –CCC and IBM– we first identified eight affordances that describe various wiki possibilities and practices. We then identified four properties of these affordances including multiplicity, referential, situatedness, and communal. These properties represent the main contribution of the paper in that they extend the notion of affordance by theorizing new concepts that describe relational dynamics, situated and contextual conditions, and social factors involved in enacting, perceiving, and exploiting affordances. 

This thesis examines organizational use of social media. It focuses on developing an understanding of the ways by which social media are used within formal organizational settings. From the vantage point of this thesis such an understanding can be achieved by looking at tensions and incompatibilities that might potentially exist between social media and organization because of their distinct characteristics. It is argued that the distinct characteristics of social media (e.g. openness, transparency, flexibility, etc.) and organization (e.g., hierarchy, formal relationships, standard procedures, etc.) may engender tensions and incompatibilities that affect the ways of using social media and their potential in organizations. The main premise here is that the possibilities, behaviors, and practices afforded by social media are recognizably different in nature from common and established organizational practices, behaviors, norms, and routines.

Through a structurational understanding of organizational use of social media, influenced by Giddens’ theory of structuration and Orlikowski’s practice lens for studying technology use, this thesis offers the perspective of immiscibility to capture tensions and incompatibilities driven by the distinctive characteristics of social media and organization. It basically offers a way of seeing social media use in organizations as a dynamic, in- practice interplay between social media and organization characteristics. One key argument in this thesis is that the immiscible interplay of social media and organization, produces, at least in transition, ‘a bureaucracy of social media’. Social media, it is argued, are used in ways that are essentially bureaucratic, reflecting and also reinforcing established characteristics of formal organizations through the production and reproduction of structures which are driven by the immiscible interplay.

The development of such an understanding was achieved through multiple research studies focusing on the use of the wiki technology for knowledge collaboration and sharing in two large, multinational organizations: CCC and IBM. A number of qualitative methods were used in these studies to collect empirical evidence from the two organizations including interviews, field visits, observations, and document analysis. The overarching contribution of this thesis centers on offering a unique way of understanding organizational use of social media by putting forward tensions and incompatibilities between social media and organization and also by providing an understanding of how such tensions and incompatibilities affect the potential for change by social media.

The present document provides a general overview ofmy research which aims at understanding theemergence of new organizational arrangements in thecontext of using open Wikis for knowledge collaborationand sharing. It also provides an overview of myresearch, motivation and discussion of the researchproblem, aim and research questions, and methods.Further, an overview of the current situation of myresearch is presented. Finally, it provides a discussionof the benefits from participating at the CSCW2012 DC.

The current paper discusses issues related to the use of the wiki technology at theworkplace for social knowledge collaboration and sharing. This kind of technology isprincipally flexible and free in the sense of allowing people to create, edit, and shape contentcollaboratively. However, this paper argues that the application and use of a wiki within anorganizational setting might be influenced by social and structural properties that governcollaboration and sharing. It is based on empirical data obtained through eleven semistructuredinterviews with employees working for a large multinational organization. Thetheory of structuration was used as a theoretical framework to guide the empirical inquiry.Eventually, the paper concludes with discussing a number of structures associated withevolving norms, interpretations, and resources that govern and shape the use of a wiki as atool for social and open collaboration.

Traditional approaches to knowledge collaboration and sharing have proven to be limited in the sense of addressing organizational needs of dynamic and distributed knowledge. More recently, the emergence of social media and the second generation of web technologies have introduced new ways and possibilities for sharing knowledge in organizations. In particular, the wiki technology, as one type of social media, is argued to mark a shift in the way people collaborate and share knowledge with each other on the web. It represents a new, open style of knowledge collaboration and sharing which allows anyone to freely and openly create and shape knowledge. In this respect, organizations have been attracted by this new dynamic approach which is based on open collaboration and flexible participation. More organizations are using wikis in order to effectively leverage distributed knowledge and improve their competitive edge. Against this backdrop, this research is concerned with examining how such organizations use social media, the wiki technology in particular, for sharing knowledge among individuals and groups. The aim is twofold: to develop an understanding of the ways by which these individuals and groups exchange and share knowledge with each other and to identify different factors that influence knowledge collaboration and sharing using a wiki in an organizational setting. The research is based on three published research papers which provide both theoretical and empirical accounts of knowledge collaboration and sharing using wikis. To these ends of this research, an interpretive case study was used as an empirical research method with interviews as primary sources of data. Several other data sources have been triangulated during the empirical inquiry including field visits, observations, and documents. The case took place at a large multinational organization that used a wiki as a collaborative platform to support knowledge sharing among members of several professional communities of practice. Eventually, the outcome of the research is a thorough understanding that describes knowledge collaboration and sharing using a wiki as a dynamic social process involving recursive and dynamic social interactions among members of communities of practice through which knowledge is collaboratively constructed and reconstructed and thus shared. It also presents a dual impact of wiki openness on knowledge collaboration and sharing within organizations.

The use of social media technologies in organizations has introduced novel ways of collaboration, communication, and knowledge sharing. In this respect, the present study is concerned with examining the use of one type of social media, the wiki technology, by members of several professional communities of practice to collaborate and share knowledge with each other. As such, it seeks to identify and understand the factors that influence their use of the wiki at a large multinational organization. To this end we used an interpretive exploratory case study which included 12 in-depth interviews with senior employees and managers as primary sources of data. Additional data was obtained during two field visits at the organization through observation of the wiki, field notes, and organizational documents. The study concludes with rich insights into the dual impact of the openness of wiki collaboration as well as the manner and value of using the wiki for knowledge collaboration and sharing at the workplace.

Social media technologies are increasingly used within organizational settings. Particularly, organizations continue to adopt and use wikis for enabling collaboration among their professional communities of practice. At this respect, the current paper reports results from an interpretive case study focusing on the use of a wiki for knowledge collaboration and sharing at a large multinational organization. It examines how the wiki is used by members of several professional communities of practice through interviews, observations, field studies, and documents. It concludes by showing that the openness of the wiki has a dual impact on wiki collaboration and also discusses how the wiki might serve as both an enabler and inhibitor for community and knowledge collaboration.

The question of whether intelligence can be

attributed to groups or not has been raised in many scientific

disciplines. In the field of computer-supported collaborative

learning, this question has been examined to understand how

computer-mediated environments can augment human

cognition and learning on a group level. The era of social

computing which represents the emergence of Web 2.0

collaborative technologies and social media has stimulated a

wide discussion about collective intelligence and the global

brain. This paper reviews the theory of distributed cognition

in the light of these concepts in an attempt to analyze and

understand the emergence process of intelligence that takes

place in the context of computer-mediated collaborative and

social media environments. It concludes by showing that the

cognitive organization, which occurs within social interactions

serves as a catalyst for intelligence to emerge on a group level.

Also a process model has been developed to show the process

of collaborative knowledge construction in Wikipedia that

characterizes such cognitive organization.