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Chapter 11 - Social Media in Open Strategy: A Five-Flows Model of Strategy Making and Enactment

from Part III - Technological Assemblages for Open Strategy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 July 2019

David Seidl
Affiliation:
Universität Zürich
Georg von Krogh
Affiliation:
Swiss Federal University (ETH), Zürich
Richard Whittington
Affiliation:
Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
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Summary

Many organizations – large and small – have begun to implement enterprise social media for use among employees and senior leadership. According to Leonardi, Huysman, and Steinfield (2013: 2), enterprise social media allow workers to: (1) communicate messages with specific coworkers or broadcast messages to everyone in the organization; (2) explicitly indicate or implicitly reveal particular coworkers as communication partners; (3) post, edit, and sort text and files linked to themselves or others; and (4) view the messages, connections, text, and files communicated, posted, edited, and sorted by anyone else in the organization at any time of their choosing. The broad family of social media technologies used in organizations today includes social networking sites, blog platforms, microblogging tools, wikis, and social tagging tools (Leonardi & Vaast, 2017). Today’s popular examples include Slack, Yammer, Workplace, Chatter, and Jive – with new entrants sure to displace some of those in the future. What do these new tools, which have traditionally been thought of as platforms for employees’ social interaction, have to do with strategy?

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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