Social Media and Their Affordances for Organizing: A Review and Agenda for Research

Abstract

Social media—computer-mediated tools of the Web 2.0 generation that make it possible for anyone to create, circulate, share, and exchange information in a variety of formats and with multiple communities—have become increasingly widespread in today’s organizations. Social media have started to affect multiple organizational phenomena and processes. This article pursues three interrelated goals. First, it provides a theoretical framework, based upon the concept of affordances, to theorize the potential implications of social media use for organizing. Second, it reviews existing scholarship on social media and organizing, highlighting social media diffusion, use, and implications for organizational processes of communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing. Third, it relies upon the affordance perspective and existing scholarship to articulate an agenda for future research on social media and organizing, advocating for a diversification of the phenomena under study and for greater diversity and innovativeness in the methodological approaches devised to investigate these phenomena.