Social media affordances and governance in the workplace: An examination of organizational policies

Abstract

This paper examines how organizations perceive affordances of social media and how they react to their employees' use of social media through policies, a key means of organizational governance. Existing literature identified 4 affordances - visibility, persistence, editability, and association (between people and between people and information) - as action potentials of social media in organizations. Content analysis of a sample of organizational social media policies reveals that organizations especially reacted to the affordances of visibility and persistence much more than to the affordance of editability. It also discovers a third type of association (between employees and organization). It shows how organizations' reactions to social media evolved from being solely concerned with risk management to also considering its value-generating potential. © 2013 International Communication Association.