The Organizational Blog as a Boundary Object

Abstract

This article looks at organizational blogger roles and how they both reflect and affect the way knowledge is communicated across department boundaries in a corporate blogging context. The blog is approached from a sociotechnical perspective, addressing and looking into the various roles in a community of practice and the enactment of the bloggers in a transparent context. Empirical examples of discourses at work in an organizational blog are highlighted, and the diverging roles and dilemmas of the blogging employees are discussed. People within the same organization have different goals in relation to the same technology, and the content of the blog and the blog comments are managed differently by the internal bloggers which feel empowered or disempowered. The article pinpoints roles of enactment in a socio-technical perspective through pointing out conflicting goals, roles and the resulting counter discourses and shows examples of how the group of bloggers with the shared narrative tradition is able to mobilize its members and create subgroups for appropriate blog behaviors and changing behavior.