| dc.description.abstract | Over the last decade, social media has diffused widely through society, increasingly impacting aspects of our lives. In the private sphere, we use social media to develop and maintain personal relationships. In the civic arena, activists use social media to raise awareness of social ills and mobilize collective action. Politicians use social media to represent their platforms, solicit citizens’ input, mobilize financial support, and get out votes. Emergency responders use social media to collect and disseminate information about natural and man-made disasters. Mass media uses social media to extend its information gathering reach, relying on citizen journalists for the copy, photographs, and video footage they share through social media, and its information dissemination reach as media organizations raise awareness and draw audiences through social media.
Against this backdrop of private and civic use of social media, businesses have increasingly begun to adopt and use social media for a range of purposes including internal communication and knowledge sharing, marketing and product promotion, recruiting, and engaging in and representing their social responsibility activities. Despite extensive organizational use of social media, however, our systematic understanding of the impact of such use on organizational effectiveness is still limited. In particular, it is not clear why/how social media might impact organizations’ financial performance and legitimacy—crucial organizational effectiveness that determines organization survival. In my dissertation, I therefore propose a mechanism that addresses this why/how question. In particular, I propose that organizational logic diversity is a key mechanism through which organizational social media use can enhance organizations’ legitimacy and financial performance. I further propose that the comprehensiveness of organizational narratives influences organizational social media use and moderates the effect of firms’ social media use on logic diversity.
I examine my proposed research model within the context of the energy sector. Because of its geopolitical significance, the energy sector is being buffeted by activities in the civic arena—by activists challenging firms’ practices, politicians and government regulators for whom the energy sector serves as a platform, emergency responders dealing with the fallout of disasters, and mass media for whom the sector provides rich copy. Using archival data in conjunction with novel data extraction approaches—including machine learning, I constructed a panel dataset of 83 firms across five years. I then tested my research model on this dataset using a Prais-Winsten regression to account for panel heteroscedasticity and panel-specific autocorrelations. Findings largely support my proposed model. I conclude by discussing the meaning and salience of these findings to ongoing research on social media and the business value of IT. | en_US |
