“Going on trial”: Teachers’ team performance in social media groups when facing problematic work-related issues

Abstract

This study examines how a problematic work-related issue is raised in a large self-organized thematic professional Facebook group and how the topic is continued in the discussion that follows. Based on big data from a large corpus assembled through the Facebook Application Programming Interface, a unique case thread is selected for in-depth analysis. The aim is to analyse how social support is performed through professional identity work in moment-by-moment online interactions. The findings illustrate how the performance of social support in a thread includes both supportive and remedial interchanges that reveal emergent impression management and a mutually shaped professional teacher identity. Further, the findings indicate that member performance, generally relatively neutral in non-critical discussion threads, changes in relation to the problematic work-related issue in the post that challenges the collective identity of the group. This means that the interaction engenders cooperative and supportive interchanges that motivate members to perform as a team and cooperate as supportive team members.