Enterprise Social Media at Work: Weaving the Social Fabric of Collaboration

The introduction of IT-enabled collaborative tools such as Enterprise Social Media (ESM) has brought new forms of organizational collaboration to the forefront. We introduce social fabric as a theoretical frame to reveal how ESM can become part-and-parcel of the social environment in which organizational members interact and collaborate. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s cartography of controversies, we present novel empirical insights from a case study of the ESM platform Yammer in an IT consultancy company. Our analysis uncovers four threads of the social fabric: ‘public-private context’, ‘social-professional content’, ‘praise-reprimands giving ratio’ and ‘noise-news perception\u27 that characterize the interactions between the organizational members and how collaboration is woven on the respective ESM platform. The findings show that delineating the emerging threads of the social fabric can help tracing the progress of different collaborative initiatives on ESM platforms and anticipating their success