Multiple Social Media in Practice–Investigating Emergent Work Practices

Abstract

Social media platforms have in the last decade been widely used in the workplace. Although many organizations use multiple social media platforms for different purposes, recent research has focussed on the use of single social media platforms and its implications for work practices. The present study focuses on multiple social media use in the workplace. This perspective embraces social media platforms used for both internal and external purposes, as well as social media content produced on third-party platforms. Moreover, few studies focus on how the use of multiple social media in the workplace affects existing work practices. Therefore, this study aims to examine how new work practices develop over time and how the workplace is transformed due to the ongoing use of multiple social media. The present study contributes to the Information Systems (IS) literature by emphasizing that the explicit features of “algorithmic phenomena” of social media platforms, like ever-changing algorithms and transparency, create the need for new work practices as well as new organizational structures.