Abstract:

The use of social media in organizations has become increasingly common over the past decade and continues to proliferate. Social media is arguably a transformative force that has the capacity to change how organizations communicate, both internally and externally. Compared to other information technologies (IT) used in an organizational setting, social media does not serve a specific purpose. That is, social media is flexible in form of use and the content and its usefulness are dependent on how the user makes sense of it. Hence, compared to earlier information system (IS) research, social media does not always have a predictable purpose in an organizational context. Hence, the use of social media calls for changes in work practices, structures, skill requirements, routines and professional identities, and as a result, the nature of many industries and organizations is changing. This also includes the need for new organizational knowledge and organizational learning and therefore requires that organizations are able to adapt to new IT. Even though organizational interest in social media has risen in recent years, there is a lack of research focusing on understanding the implications of social media use in organizations over time. Researchers point out that research in the area of social media has largely ignored the more general use of social media by and within organizations. It is not yet clear why so many organizations use social media and what implications the use of social media has on the organization. Therefore, there is lack of understanding of the organizational challenges surrounding social media use and a lack of empirical illustrations on how social media produce new organizational behavior.

The present paper explores the process of introducing, use and effects of organizational social media in an international hotel chain. This process is viewed to be a learning process, in which organizational users, learn to use social media over time. A longitudinal case study has been made over a period of five years (2013-2018). A total of 40 interviews including follow-up interviews with organizational members in the hotel chain management as well as 14 of the hotels in seven European countries has been carried out. The data has been triangulated with online observations (“netnography”), workplace observations and written documents. The findings suggest that social media use over a period of five years had major implications for existing work practices and led to major organizational changes in the form of organizational structure and hierarchy. The analysis shows that the flexible nature of social media technologies influence the individual learning process, also affecting organizational performance over time. The paper makes a theoretical contribution by exploring social media use related to learning processes of organizational members over time and hence contributes to the literature on workplace learning. By using the concept of organizational social media, a more general sense of social media use in organizations, the study also contributes to social media research that to a large extent has focused on fragmented use of social media in organizations, e.g. enterprise social media.

Keywords:

Organizational social media, learning, workplace learning, organizational change, case study, hospitality.