The social media revolution: Sharing and learning in the age of leaky knowledge

Abstract

This paper suggests that social media may be useful for knowledge sharing because they are leaky pipes for communication-the directionality and content of a particular message is visible to people not involved in it. However, social media are only useful for knowledge sharing if some people contribute knowledge that can leak from them and others retrieve knowledge that is leaking. I draw on interviews with employees from a financial services firm to develop a typology of reasons why new employees would not want to contribute what they know to a social media or retrieve from it knowledge contributed by others. Then, I use existing theory on knowledge sharing in organizations, coupled with recent writings about social media affordances, to develop propositions about how these barriers to knowledge sharing might be effectively overcome through strategic use of the social media affordances themselves.

“That looks like me or something i can do”: Affordances and constraints in the online identity work of US LGBTQ+ millennials

“…Findings support prior work identifying association as enabling serendipity (Björneborn, , ) and information sharing (Leonardi, ). However, association can also amplify the surveillance and policing of marginalized identities in online environments.…”

“…Studies have examined how the physical and digital affordances of libraries engender information practices including information acquisition (Sadler & Given, ), serendipitous discovery (Björneborn, , ), and tool development (Given, Lisa, & Wilson, ). Other studies have focused on the affordances of information and communication technologies (ICTs), examining how their strategic use can facilitate mobile information seeking (Shankar, O'Brien, & Absar, ), crowdsourcing (Zhao & Zhu, ), user engagement with digital image collections (Ruge & Denison, ), and organizational knowledge sharing (Leonardi, ; Nelson, Jarrahi, & Thomson, ). Implications are design‐oriented and focus on how physical and digital environments can be changed to facilitate specific information practices.…”

“…Implications are design‐oriented and focus on how physical and digital environments can be changed to facilitate specific information practices. For instance, to overcome barriers to knowledge sharing, Leonardi () suggested that organizations can use push notifications to connect people to content (material change) and encourage sharing of nonwork‐related content (practice‐based change).…”

Theorizing the ‘social’ in social media: The role of productive dialogs for collaborative knowledge creation

“…Generally, social media are stressed as particularly useful for knowledge sharing in organizations because they allow organizational members to communicate and collaborate directly and publicly with each other (Majchrzak, Faraj, Kane, & Azad, 2013;Leonardi & Vaast, 2016;Panahi, Watson, & Partridge, 2013). As Leonardi and his colleagues have shown, social media afford in unique ways behavior that makes these technologies particularly suitable for organizational knowledge sharing (Leonardi, 2007(Leonardi, , 2017Leonardi & Vaast, 2016;Neeley & Leonardi, 2018;Treem & Leonardi, 2012). Generally, the concept of affordances refer to the socio-material entanglement between the material functionalities of these technologies and how individuals use these technologies (Treem & Leonardi, 2012).…”

The Sustainable Positive Effects of Enterprise Social Media on Employees: The Visibility and Vicarious Learning Lens

“…The knowledge management literature posits that an organization's knowledge can, under certain circumstances, form the basis for sustainable competitive advantage [26][27][28]. Although a growing number of organizations have implemented ESM for knowledge management [6,29], their capabilities in using ESM are advancing gradually [30], and ESM does not consistently help organizations achieve their goals [31]. Our research provides a new perspective on vicarious learning to illustrate ESM's effects on knowledge management, helping organizations gain sustainable competitive advantages from effectively managing their internal knowledge assets with ESM.…”