Managing Hybrid Social Media: A Case Study of Employees' Boundary Management Strategies on Wechat

Abstract

Social media has been integrated into our everyday life and is widely used for work communication and collaboration in many companies, which leads to blurring of the boundaries between work and life and makes employees' boundary management more difficult. In this research, drawing on the boundary management theoretical framework, I conduct a case study in a medium-size (around 200 employees and 400 residents) retirement community in South China to examine employees' boundary management strategies, motivations and tensions on WeChat, a popular social media and a primary tool for work communication in China. Through ethnography and interviews, the research contributes to literatures on the sociology of work, employment relations and organization studies in revealing important influences of organizational factors on workplace boundary management including hierarchical structure, leadership style, cultural norms and values which are largely overlooked previously. The findings also show complex boundary management behaviours that beyond the four typical types of behaviours (i.e., open, audience, content and hybrid) of the theoretical framework and I refine it by generating new types of behaviours: open-audience, hybrid-open and hybrid-content. Contributions, limitations and future research directions are discussed in the end.