Dit is een uitgebreide samenvatting van alle tentamenstof voor Topic Organisations and Social Media. Zowel de hoorcolleges als de literatuur zijn in deze samenvatting verwerkt. Dankzij deze samenvatting heb ik dit vak kunnen afsluiten met een 9.1.
Week 1 – The challenges of
understanding organizations and social
media
- However, social media
are often understood
rather conveniently, as
coming about ‘all of a
sudden’ and by accident
- Social media are often defined simply by lists of proprietary icons
- Organizations display social media icons in much the same way as hotels hang signs
outside their doors
But what are social media and what added value do they promise?
- In spite of a glut of ‘authorities’ vying to tell organizations what to do, social media
are not well-understood
- Social media challenge our existing knowledge, and deeply engrained assumptions,
about communication and technology
Thomas Kuhn:
- Our observations and understandings are always grounded in specific
points of view.
- If we change our point of view, we can start to see things in a
different way.
Social sciences cannot exist if they are not critically related to their theoretical concepts and
frameworks by used those who practise them
- Anthony Giddens:
Social theory has the task of providing concepts and frameworks which can be
placed in the service of empirical work.
à Consequently, a proper understanding of social media, technology and communication
calls for the development of a critical social theory of social media
5 Misunderstandings within articles by Kaplan and Kietzmann et al.
Kaplan & Kietzmann et al. have written two widely used articles aiming to deliver a better
understanding of organizations and social media
, - Strengths: recognize the importance of developing concepts and frameworks for a
better understanding organizations and social media.
- Weaknesses: five misunderstandings undermine the explanatory power of their
work.
In this first lecture, we shall examine each of these five misunderstandings. In turn, these
allow us to grasp systematically the poor understanding of social media and organizations
today, and start to address them!
1. Social media are approached as a sudden invention in the form of Web 2.0
What Kaplan & Kietzmann do:
- Almost ignore that social media development has a history.
- Move swiftly on to treat social media as a sudden invention in the form of Web 2.0.
However:
- Tim Berners-Lee:
“Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web
2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the
Web was supposed to be all along....”
- Explanatory power of Web 2.0 as a concept is very weak.
- Referring to Web 2.0 neglects the long view.
- Web 2.0 isolates social media from the growth of understanding of modern
communication technologies, the conditions of their development, and their impact.
2. 'Social presence' and 'media richness theory' are used in a deterministic
classification
What Kaplan & Haenlein do:
However:
- Gerardine DeSanctis:
“... richer media (such as face-to-face meetings) are not necessarily preferable or
more effective than leaner electronic media.”
- Social media do not feature in organizational communication as a ‘magic bullets’ all
on their own as Kaplan & Haenlein suggest.
- It is a lot more complicated than deterministic
3. No attempt is made to properly theorize the connection between organizations
and social media
What Kaplan & Haenlein do:
- Draw uncritically on Erving Goffman’s work on social processes, self-disclosure &
presentation. (micro-level)
However:
- Anthony Giddens:
, “Goffman's sociology... has not developed an account of institutions... Institutions
appear as unexplained parameters within which actors organize their practical
activities.”
- Organizational features are treated as a mere backdrop to social processes.
- Using Goffman, you cannot explain how social media use impacts on the shaping and
reshaping of organizational form.
4. Makes use of a biological analogy to describe the shaping of social media
functionalities and business needs
What Kietzmann et al. do:
- They claim that a simple honeycomb is enough to capture the patterning of social
media functionalities and business needs.
- Emergent functionalities of social media use are ordered into an arbitrary pattern of
a honeycomb.
However:
- Anthony Giddens:
Biological analogies used in this way introduce a “... teleological quality... social items
or activities are held to exist because they meet functional needs.”
- The honeycomb, its functionality, and shape have no explanatory power whatsoever.
What’s social about a honeycomb?
- It's misleading to suggest that you can take a snapshot, as one can of a honeycomb,
and then use it to understand the dynamics of social media outcomes that occur
over time.
5. Their claims give rise to difficulties in understanding organizations and social
media practice
Questioning the explanatory power of Kaplan & Kietzmann et al.:
- How can collaborative projects using social media be inherently democratic?
- What understanding can be gained from classifying blogs in a general fashion as
being low in media richness?
- Facebook involves various forms of social interaction, so what purpose can it serve
to place Facebook in a general scheme?
- Why do virtual game worlds provide for the highest level of social presence and
media richness?
- In what way can life in virtual social worlds ever be similar to real life?
- Is it really possible to claim that Linkedin is configured around 'identity' and
Facebook around 'relationships'?
- How can such concepts and frameworks ever support organizations in choosing the
right medium, in developing strategies for monitoring, and in understanding and
responding to different social media activities?
So what are we going to do in this course?
Over the coming weeks, I invite you to join me in constructively addressing these typical
misunderstandings of organizations and social media
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