Jeffrey W. Treem

Social Media as Technologies of Accountability Explaining Resistance to Implementation Within Organizations

This study extends recent work exploring the affordances of social media in organizations by considering how social media may also operate as technologies of accountability. This perspective adopts a performative view of social media use in organizations and recognizes that the technologies not only display communication to organizational members but also, in doing so, potentially increase the accountability of workers. Using a case study of the implementation of a social media system inside a financial services company, this work explores how workers view social media in terms of various forms of accountability. The findings reveal that prior to implementation of the social media system workers expressed concern about the accountability social media would create, and that the reluctance to face the accountability associated with communications led to low use of the social media system.

Recognizing Expertise Factors Promoting Congruity Between Individuals’ Perceptions of Their Own Expertise and the Perceptions of Their Coworkers

Previous research has demonstrated the critical role communication plays in a group’s ability to recognize its expert members. This study looks broadly at the different forms of communication that might influence expertise recognition and considers how structural, relational, and communicative factors are related to individuals’ success in having their expertise recognized by other group members. In addition, we advance a view of expertise recognition in terms of expertise sharing and consider the circumstances under which an individual’s self-perceived expertise is likely to match the perceptions of other group members. Drawing on survey data from 99 employees at a financial services company, we find that it is communication practices, and not structural influences, that primarily relate to group members having their expertise recognized by coworkers. The findings extend theory that views attributions of individuals’ expertise in organizations as a communicative phenomenon that emerges through work practices.

How Organizations Communicate Expertise Without Experts: Practices and Performances of Knowledge-Intensive Firms

This work examines how knowledge-intensive firms that lack strong ties to professional groups, or exclusive jurisdiction in a technical domain, communicate organizational expertise. A practice-based view of organizational expertise is used to examine how workers accomplish expertise through recurrent practices, and the processes through which that expertise becomes performed to clients as organizational expertise. Drawing on fieldwork conducted at two public relations firms, analysis indicates the organizations performed expertise by using representations that demonstrated they provided valuable services that would be difficult for clients to otherwise obtain. Furthermore, the findings reveal how local practices used by workers to produce the representations inside the organizations were obscured to clients to facilitate performances of expertise at the organizational level.

Striving to Be King of Mobile Mountains: Communication and Organizing Through Digital Fitness Technology

This study considers fitness-tracking applications as settings for communicative performances. Qualitative interviews and observations with 41 users of a cycling-focused fitness application revealed communicative themes of qualifying, social sharing, and withholding. Users also assessed other members through social-group comparing and upward comparing. This study develops theory by revealing how individuals use the technology to communicate about their physical acts, and how the context of use facilitates organizing processes. We argue that use of this fitness application extends our understanding of how communication can constitute a community of practice (CoP; Brown & Duguid, 1991; Lave & Wenger, 1991). Primarily, the hybrid online/offline nature of Strava complicates the traditional understanding of communication and CoPs.

Analytics and expert collaboration: How individuals navigate relationships when working with organizational data

Analytics is heralded as an important, new and increasingly widespread organizational function, and one that promises new approaches for generating value from organizational knowledge. What is not yet clear is how analytics may affect how organizations work with data, or how organizations can realize the benefits of analytics. Analytics, envisioned as not just a technical skill but a reconceptualization of data’s place in the organization, may improve, challenge or undermine existing processes and procedures. Building upon scholarship on expert collaboration and multidisciplinary knowledge work, this study reports a mixed-methods investigation of the implementation of analytics at a Fortune 500 financial services company. The findings make multiple contributions, including (a) confirming the importance of relationships among organizational experts in analytics work; (b) exploring specific communicative strategies employed by practitioners in those relationships; (c) demonstrating that the functioning of those relationships may differ depending on the type of analytics work (i.e. the degree to which it involves requesting, collaborating or commissioning); and (d) indicating that analytics practitioners need autonomy, as well as technical acumen, to question entrenched ideas about organizational data and problems. The findings contribute to practice by identifying problems that may be common in implementing analytics and strategies employed to address them.

I Communicate, Therefore I Belong Processes of Identification Among Organizational Representatives

Although research has explored employees’ organizational identification, few scholars have investigated liminal workers’ identification. This gap is problematic because nonmembers represent organizations and their attachments may influence their work. To understand this poorly understood phenomenon, we conducted interviews with agency social media writers who were not employed by organizations they represented online. Contrary to practitioners avowing that only internal employees can communicate via social media, we found agency writers adopt multiple identification lenses, which lead to different work practices. These results contribute to organizational, stakeholder, and consumer-company identification research and help social media writers better communicate on behalf of organizations.