In what ways has this shift been innovative, at both the personal and professional level?

300 words response
The short video we watched, “The Social Media Revolution,” tells us at the 3:48 minute mark that social media “isn’t a fad. It’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.” In what ways has this shift been innovative, at both the personal and professional level? From your own experience and viewpoint, how has it innovated communication? What strategies do you see individuals and organizations employing?
After reading Integrating Social Media into the Workplace, begin to look at things from a management perspective. What, in your mind, are some of the deeper implications of the introduction of social media into the workplace? How does this innovation stand to both strengthen and problematize the work environment

Passage:
Research indicates that people are increasingly spending time with social media and other information communication technology. However, scholars have not fully examined how employees as holistic media consumers utilize social media in multiple contexts. Through in-depth interviews (N = 29), this study demonstrates that even as social media are embedded in organizational media use routines, employees question this technology for 2 reasons: It distracts from tasks and threatens personal privacy. These concerns often, but not exclusively, relate to employee age and the amount of time they have worked for the company. The study concludes by arguing that social media’s arrival in the workplace may exacerbate tensions and problems that are associated with presence-creep and the distortion of the work-life balance.
In today’s digitally networked global economy, the boundaries between personal and professional identities and between work and home spaces are being re-shaped. Indeed, changing global market conditions and the increased availability of information communication technology are facilitating the blurring of lines between employees’ home and work environments (Deuze, [ 5]; Raine & Wellman, [23]). Concerns about the precarious nature of work (with employees having an increasingly tenuous grasp over their employment) and the increased expectation that employees remain constantly connected to work have been raised by scholars such as Deuze ([ 5]), Gregg ([15]), and Gill and Pratt ([12]). Along with these concerns are questions about how and when it is appropriate to utilize various digital platforms and communication devices. Most often, these discussions have occurred with respect to the work-life balance and the ways in which employees are coping with the intrusion of work-related communication technology into their personal lives. Overlooked in the literature, to this point, is another consideration: How rules influence the use of personal social media in the workplace.
If we acknowledge that behaviors are often socially negotiated and interpreted (i.e., people learn from others about how to act), it becomes important to examine the processes by which social rules are developed and maintained with respect to communications technology. In treating the workplace as a distinct system, a line of structuration-guided scholarship (e.g., Orlikowski, [20]; Sinclaire & Vogus, [24]; Watson-Manheim & Belanger, [30]) has considered the relationship between social exchange and rule development and agency-imbued individuals’ experiences with technology. This scholarship holds that rules as structures influence human behavior and these rules are established in response to technological and social factors. Although evidence suggests that our personal and professional media identities are merging, a deeper consideration of how one’s personal and professional networks are arranged and the meanings that workers give to their various audiences is needed. It is also worthwhile to investigate the socially negotiated development of rules for acceptable social media use in the workplace. This case study of a small United States company explored the influence of individual backgrounds on the development of organizational media use routines and the crossover of media consumption activities into multiple realms.
Literature Review
The economic downturn of the 21st century’s first decade and broader changes relating to globalization have left employees, particularly well-paid and high-status workers, in a more precarious situation than a generation ago (Gill & Pratt, [12]; Gregg, [15]). Work today is seen as less secure and more centered on the individual, with employees bearing the brunt of finding, negotiating, and securing work (Deuze, [ 5]; Gill & Pratt, [12]). Along with these structural changes, the explosion of mobile information and communication technologies in the last fifteen years has made work inherently more accessible than ever before. Employees can now easily check email, work remotely, and stay abreast of work issues from home and while they travel. This has given rise to more flexible work schedules and explicit (from corporate) and implicit (from peers) expectations that employees remain constantly connected to their jobs (Gill & Pratt, [12]; Gregg, [14]; [15]). This is best understood as a process of “presence bleed,” where work-related communication platforms and devices creep into spaces and times that were previously off limits (Gregg, [15]). Quite simply, employees face more pressure to remain virtually “on” even when they are not in the physical environment of work. This has implications for the divide between work and home: “[F]acilitated by advancements in information and communication technologies … work and leisure can increasingly be seen as extensions of each other” (Deuze, [ 5], p. 30). This transition to a media-saturated environment involves personal information spaces, which are spheres of individual technology use that are habitually incorporated into everyday life (Deuze, [ 5]). Personal information spaces are physical (the location of where we consume media such as the office or home and the devices that we use to consume media) and experiential (interacting and communicating with people).
A significant body of literature considers the various issues involved in the maintenance of the work-life balance (e.g., Denker & Dougherty, [ 4]; Gregg, [15]; Greenhaus, Collins, & Shaw, [13]; Hill, Hawkins, Ferris, & Weitzman, [17]). It would be shortsighted to argue that technology alone is responsible for reshaping the boundaries between our personal and professional lives. Yet of these factors, technology, along with communication, plays a central role in structuring social life (Orlikowski & Yates, [22]). Industry research bears this out. U.S. adults consumed more than 11 hours of media each day in 2011 on average (EMarketer.com, [ 8]). Furthermore, U.S. adults spend, on average, 23 hours per week communicating with each other via social media, phones, and email (EMarketer.com, [ 9]). This research indicates that personal and professional activities are often intermingled when we engage with technology. Reflecting this, contemporary business literature holds that employees who use social media in their personal lives expect similar tools at work (Holmes, [18]).
In addressing the implications of the use of technology in multiple contexts, it is helpful to consider the composition of individuals’ various professional and social networks. The widespread adoption of mobile technologies and social media has given rise to what Raine and Wellman ([23]) called networked individualism, which is the idea that people function more as connected individuals and less as embedded group members in networks. Networks are larger, more diversified, and prone to change in this generation than in prior generations. Raine and Wellman ([23]) argue that mobile and social technologies have not isolated people as was initially feared but instead, they have reconfigured social relations in such a way that people have more freedom to move from group to group. Related to this, the concept of context collapse describes the flattening out of multiple distinct audiences in one’s social network (Vitak, [28]). Rather than making each audience distinct, social media erase the lines between temporal, social, and spatial boundaries to the point where one’s audiences are treated as one large homogenous group (Vitak, [28]). This is seen as problematic in the context of work, as employees have developed strategies to ward off context collapse and to maintain a degree of separation from work and home (Vitak, Lampe, Ellison, & Gray, [29]).
The increased potential for peer-interaction outside of the workplace on social media brings to mind privacy-related questions involving the maintenance of professional/personal boundaries. The rise of interactive media and the new capabilities of networks to carry mass amounts of information have given rise to a digital enclosure for consumers (Andrejevic, [ 1]; [ 2]). The enclosure of personal information is a form of exploitation in which companies have unequal access to data collection, storage, and manipulation. From the consumer’s perspective, entry into a digital enclosure is frequently predicated on surveillance or monitoring (Andrejevic, [ 2]). This has implications that can be applied to the professional space. Twitter tweets, Facebook status updates, and other social media posts that are shared and seen by one’s co-workers all have the potential to contribute to a subculture of support in the workplace (Gregg, [15]). However, scholars have not fully explored the relationship between the surveillance proclivities of employers and this support environment (Gregg, [15]). As we consider employee boundary maintenance behaviors, it becomes important to look at the rules that develop around social media use in the workplace.
Media Use Routines in Context
One way to think about the adoption and patterning of technology into our lives is through media choice and routine. Giddens ([11]) argued that “routine (whatever is done habitually) is a basic element of day-to-day social activity” (p. xxiii). Actions have a habitual quality that is deeply embedded in the structured routines of everyday life (Taneja, Webster, Malthouse, & Ksiazek, [25]). Structuration theory offers insight about the development of media use routines and rule-development. According to structuration, people influence the creation of and are influenced by the iterative reproduction of social norms (structures) in social systems (Giddens, [10]; [11]). Structure has three dimensions: signification (rules that constitute meaning); domination (rules that determine the nature of power), and legitimation (rules that are interpreted and sanctioned by agents) (Giddens, [11]). In other words, agents’ meaning-making, power, and normative sanctions are all intertwined in human action. Structuration is further predicated on the notion that agents and structure exist as a duality and are linked (Giddens, [11]). Rules-guiding structures are both the medium and outcome of the daily conduct in which actors engage.
Structuration theory has informed multiple studies on organizational routines and technology (e.g., Orlikowski, [21]; Orlikowski & Yates [22]; Taneja et al., [25]; Vallaster & de Chernatony, [27]). With these routines, embedded structures in organizations shape the action taken by employees and are modified through social interaction. Coworkers engage with each other, social exchange happens, and informal and formal rules develop. This, by extension, can influence employees’ technology use (Orlikowski, [20]). Two terms frame the routinized use of technology at work, genres and repertoires. A genre is a socially recognized communication action that is habitually enacted by members of a community for a social purpose (Orlikowski & Yates, [22]). Community members enact a genre by drawing on their tactic and explicit knowledge of genre rules (Orlikowski & Yates, [22]). Genres include memos, meetings, and videos among other forms and genre repertoires are collections of individual genres. Genres are enacted through genre rules and discursive structures that are manifested in multiple organizational and social contexts (Heracleous, [16]). Related to the notion of genres, Watson-Manheim and Belanger ([30], p. 268) held that a communication media repertoire is a “collection of communication media and identifiable routines of use for specific communication purposes within a defined user community.” Once established, these repertoires frame the expectations for community members’ continued interactions with media. Social exchanges are incorporated into media use repertoires, which are comprised of both technology and technology-use routines in defined user communities (Watson-Manheim & Belanger, [30]).
People create their own repertories of selective media use based on the many options before them (Taneja et al., [25]). Individuals use media to accomplish a purpose, observe consequences of usage, and then modify usage based on interpretations of usage consequences. This adaptation becomes patterned as part of media use routines in systems, particularly in organizations. Institutional conditions influence the development of norms of communication media usage, both directly and indirectly, by influencing perceptions of capabilities of media (Taneja et al., [25]). Emerging from the technology that scholars examined in the initial structuration studies of the 1990s, social media offer a new set of resources for the maintenance of norms and behavior in social systems. More to the point, Sinclaire and Vogus ([24]) argued that “social networking technology provides a continuous feedback loop that results in new sources of structure (new tasks, new styles of interacting) that support new decision processes and outcomes…” (p. 298). This feedback loop is involved in the reshaping and redevelopment of personal information spaces and reconsideration of personal and professional roles. Social media are capable of spanning more boundaries than prior technologies given their pervasiveness and expected use in personal and professional contexts (Deuze, [ 5]; Gregg, [14]; [15]).
In summary, a literature review suggests that more attention has been placed on the creep of work into workers’ personal lives, and not the reverse. In other words, scholars have not fully examined the rules for acceptable personal social media use at work. To advance the literature in this area, this study investigated the processes by which the rules governing social media use were socially negotiated in a professional setting. Specifically, this study considered employees’ responses to the introduction of social media as personal media spaces into the workplace by addressing the following research question:
RQ 1 :
How have employees’ boundary-related rules between personal and professional contexts influenced the incorporation of social media into technology use repertoires at work?
In answering this question it was expected that the discussion would yield insight into organizational media repertoire development, demonstrate how context-appropriate social media use develops in the workplace, and allow for a discussion of the applied management implications of the introduction of social media at work.
Methods
For this study, in-depth interviews were conducted with 29 employees at a 250-person company, “RanStar.” Respondents included two executives and an information technology specialist who provided company background information at the start of the project and 26 frontline employees who discussed their experiences with technology.
Study Procedures
Seven companies were originally approached in the Northeast United States to serve as a potential research site for this study. RanStar agreed to participate on the condition that they receive an executive summary of the report. Interviews were conducted over a yearlong period from 2012 to 2013, with twenty-three occurring in RanStar’s offices and six interviews occurring via telephone. Fourteen men and fifteen women participated. On average, respondents had worked at RanStar for 9.0 years. Interviews were recorded and transcribed, while all employees received a pseudonym for confidentiality. A company manager, who was not interviewed or present for interviews, randomly selected an initial group of employees who volunteered to participate. The semi-structured interviews involved high-level questions about technology in multiple contexts and then detailed follow-up questions about this use (see Appendix).
Research Site
RanStar has three primary divisions (support/administration, research/development, and sales) and annual revenue of greater than $20 million, which is generated through selling multiple services and products in the technology sector. Most employees work in a three-floor building at the company’s Northeast U.S. headquarters, and a small number of employees work in offices outside of the U.S. The lone non-native English-speaking respondent had spoken the language professionally for at least 15 years. Employees generally believe RanStar is a good company to work for and evidence such as industry awards and employee surveys support this. Company executives and managers reported few administrative issues, while frontline employees largely indicated that they were happy with work and their peers. RanStar did not have an official policy regarding social media use at work at the time of the study.
Data Analysis
Ongoing data analysis and interpretation through the data collection process fit with both the grounded theory (Dey, [ 6]) and case study (Yin, [32]) approaches. The case study approach involves multiple tactics and has flexibility provided the researcher thoroughly describes the selected phenomena under consideration and engages in rigorous data analysis (Yin, [32]). Coding of emergent categories and concepts, detailed memoing throughout data collection, and various member checking and data validation activities gives grounded theory a strong foundation from which interpretations can be logically drawn (Charmaz, [ 3]). Researcher memos were embedded in the interview transcription files as initial data analysis points. This initial analysis considered themes, commonalties, and differences relating to employee backgrounds. Specifically, the analysis evaluated attitudes about the introduction of social media into the workplace based on the employee’s department, whether or not they were a manager, amount of time at RanStar, and amount of social media they reported using outside of work.
From memos and initial data analysis, lower and higher order concepts emerged as concepts and categories respectively. With structuration’s focus on the interplay between rules and agents’ behavior, initial categories included “sanctioned” and “unsanctioned” media use and “formal” and “informal” social rules. With a second round of data analysis, these categories became “social monitoring” and “work routines.” At the conclusion of the initial interviews, high-level findings and interpretations were shared by the researcher with the RanStar liaison. This member checking helped with respondent and reliability checks. Although theoretical saturation is often used with qualitative interviewing, Dey ([ 6]) suggested a more appropriate term of suggestive saturation. In suggestive saturation, the researcher stops data collection when they feel the data can no longer generate new ideas. About halfway through interviews, several consistently voiced views about technology at RanStar were observed and this served as the foundation for the study’s findings.
Findings
In response to this study’s research question, analysis of interview data revealed that the incorporation of social media into technology use routines at RanStar has been contested because of concerns about out-of-work monitoring of personal behavior and concerns about monitoring of in-work behavior. Although social media have been touted for their ability to provide instant feedback to support group decision-making in the workplace (Sinclaire & Vogus, [24]), findings reveal that this feedback affordance prompts privacy questions among employees. Although rarely verbalized in direct person-to-person communication, these concerns contribute to the development of the overall company culture. Furthermore, these concerns are disrupting the integration of social media into technology use repertoires at work and are preventing social media from being fully maximized by employees for company-sanctioned tasks. With structuration’s focus on the production and reproduction of social norms, the study offers several rules for social media in this section.
Social Media Monitoring
Analysis of qualitative interviews shows that personal social media contribute to environmental surveillance in the workplace on multiple levels. The data further support the idea that employees seek to maintain a clear separation between their professional and personal audiences (Gregg, [15]; Vitak et al., [29]). A contribution of this study is to show that surveillance was related to two factors: Age and employee tenure with the company. Veteran employees and older employees were more likely to limit social media use at work and to see social media as threats to productivity, while younger and more junior employees were usually more inclined to utilize Facebook, Twitter, and other sites during the day for a mix of personal and professional purposes. Additionally, employees who had worked for the company for longer tended to be more explicit in their comments about at-work monitoring of employees (checking to see who was using social media as a distraction in the physical office) than junior employees.
Although respondents were careful to not outwardly criticize individual peers, several veteran employees expressed frustration with general social media use in the office. Consider a midlevel a manager with extensive professional experience:
We have people in this company obviously who spend more time on Facebook than others. If I were to try to correlate that, I’d think the more junior roles, for whatever reason, maybe they’re not mentally stimulating or challenging enough to the people, or maybe those people are just at a stage in their lives where they’re more interested in the social aspects of life than they are in say, career aspects.
This manager believed the company could adopt a Facebook-type site internally that encourages users to contribute personal content, yet “I just can’t see any immediate or obvious reason why we would do it.” Chuck, who has worked for RanStar for more than a decade, was also dismissive of this technology: “Younger people who grew up with that stuff, they’ll embrace it and see really a need for the social media aspects of it. But I don’t.” These two senior employees, who said they do not use social media at home, criticized the use of this technology at work, which is in line with several peers.
Several respondents reported either watching their peers use social media or having had the experience of being watched. To the former point, Kara, a mid-level manager who has been with the company for a decade offered these comments:
I know that as I walk through the building I see a lot of people on Facebook and they’re not using it work-wise. I think there’s just, there are certain … I don’t know what I want to say, it’s not genres but … there are certain cliques or groups that would probably be lost if we didn’t allow it.
Selecting her words carefully, Kara said it is “odd” seeing employees who recently have joined the company use Facebook and the company’s internal chat program for non-work purposes rather than work tasks. Kara’s use of “odd” and “lost” suggests a negative attitude toward social media, which, as expressed in other venues and interactions with peers, reveals the tension involved in social media’s emergence in the workplace as a media genre. Though rarely expressed in verbal communication, this monitoring of employee behavior in the office serves as a distinct non-verbal communicative action and signal to employees that overuse of this technology is not acceptable. Thus a rule for social media can be seen in this context: Personal social media use is allowed provided it is discreet and not a significant distraction.
Interviews indicated that there are potential concerns at RanStar with another type of monitoring. Employees who reported the greatest amount of personal social media use tended to be worried about their peers’ following their out-of-work behaviors on social networking sites. The result tended to be a separation of social networks to minimize context collapse (Vitak et al., [29]). Seventeen employees reported either having few to no coworkers as social media friends or strongly controlling the access of their colleagues to their social media profiles. These employee-preferred distinctions between professional and personal media spaces are seen in several comments, including a manager with more than a decade with the company, Isabel. In both areas of home and work social media use, Isabel is “keeping people up to date” with information. Although Isabel acknowledged that these two media routines cross over, she added that, “I don’t want my colleagues to know if I go out on a Friday night and get drunk. My private life is my private life and my work life is my work life.” Isabel is guarded about what is posted to her personal social media; this respondent reported no coworkers as Facebook friends. Also consider Rachel, who has “quite a few” coworkers as Facebook friends. Yet Rachel, who has been with the company for ten years, rarely interacts with these peers online “because even though it’s the [RanStar] network, it’s still kind of like personal stuff.” The overlap between personal and professional routines appears to have made heavy social media users uncomfortable.
According to Linda, a five-year veteran of the company who works in sales, Facebook is “a fun way to share family photos and vacation photos and that kind of thing. But we’re not closely watching each other on the social networking site.” Linda said it would be “Big Brother like” if people used Facebook to keep tabs on their coworkers. Respondents indicated concern that personal or sensitive information that is posted to personal social media accounts will be misinterpreted by their peers and will cause a problem at work. Added Lane, who had been with the company for less than a year at the time of data collection: “One picture on Facebook may look bad and people can read into things.” Related to this, Mirella, who has been with RanStar for more than two decades, said people struggle with boundaries on social media: “It seems like there are people that have … a hard time figuring out what’s appropriate to share and what isn’t. It’s a privacy kind of thing.” Mirella’s comments were directed toward her peers, yet she indicated that she was not on Facebook or Twitter herself.
Prior research indicates that social media use varies considerably by age (Duggan & Brenner, [ 7]) and age appeared to partially influence attitudes toward social media at RanStar. Respondents consistently voiced uneasiness about social media in the workplace. There was also a clear sense that employees should keep their social media audiences distinct. Yet the reasons for the concerns and for employees’ desires to ward off context collapse appeared to vary by age and by the amount of experience with the company. In particular, employees who were the most critical about the loss of productivity due to social media had extensive professional backgrounds and were older than the average respondent. Senior employees delegitimized social media because of the potential to distract people from work. On the other hand, the concerns about privacy intrusion were more strongly voiced by employees who were either recently hired or younger than the rest of their peers. Junior employees were also more inclined to reveal that they accessed personal social media at work. In light of this analysis, another rule can be described at RanStar: As employees grow into their work roles and as they are gradually exposed to the company’s culture, they are expected to subject their intra-organizational interactions to strict scrutiny and to censor contact with their peers via social media.
Established Media Use Repertoires
Interview data indicate that when social media are embedded into peer-supported structures and media use repertoires at RanStar, a clear understanding exists that the technology will be used to for the greater good of the company. Research and development staff who work with internal clients make use of internal blogs for task completion and troubleshooting. Consider Linda, who posts when she completes a hard task. The post alerts her teammates when problem is solved and shares knowledge. For Linda, blog posts are easier to find than other content such as HR policies on the intranet:
With a blog, it’s more like, “Hey I found this really cool thing that’s applicable across the board. I’m going to tag it in ways that will allow you to find it if you’re doing that kind of search.” Then you can go crazy and read what you want.
Similarly, Chuck’s team blogs when troublesome tasks are resolved. For example, this group was confronted by an esoteric yet minor problem that delayed a project. A peer spent several hours researching the topic and blogged about it. According to Chuck, who is a senior employee, “Hopefully by him blogging it and letting everybody out there know about it, it’ll be out there, a permanent record.” In one context (personal), Chuck does not see the point of social media and is critical of this technology. However, in another context (professional), Chuck is an active internal blog user. These blogs are sanctioned social technology at work.
Despite concerns about personal social media distractions and employee desires to keep personal and professional social networks separate, use of internal blogs, to varying degrees, is encouraged for the betterment of the company. Additionally, RanStar’s intranet, Net-Source, has several interactive features that prompted several employees to liken it to personal social media. Net-Source allows employees to keep profiles that the entire company can see. The intranet also features company photos and news about social events. These affordances enabled new employee Julia to see several similarities between at-work and at-home social media use. Like with personal social media, Net-Source serves a surveillance function as people post their daily work schedules, when they take time off, and project updates. According to Julia, Net-Source is:
like Facebook at work. Some of the things that people post are more personal in nature and you can see what everyone is doing. We don’t have status updates but you can log onto people’s pages and see if they’re busy or free. I think there are a lot of similarities between the two. This is more professional obviously.
Furthermore, employees rely on social media to communicate externally with clients and other stakeholders. Twenty of 29 respondents reported either having active LinkedIn accounts or had publicly searchable LinkedIn profiles. There appears to be pressure in the organization to adopt this platform. Elaina, a manager who had been with the company for almost 10 years, recalled discussing an issue with an executive. As the conversation ended, the topic of LinkedIn was raised and the executive encouraged Elaina to join the site. This prompted her to consider joining LinkedIn: “There is an allure to it. I probably should sign up.” New hire Autumn only checks her Facebook account from her personal phone, which is beyond the reach of the company’s IT staff and somewhat hidden from view. When she checks Facebook, it is usually for a “very brief” moment. Yet Autumn sees no issue with keeping LinkedIn open

Last Completed Projects