Social Media and Organizing - An Empirical Analysis of the Role of Wiki Affordances in Organizing Practices

The evolution of social media has introduced novel possibilities for work and interaction in organizations. The wiki technology is one important kind of social media technologies that is often used to facilitate the creation and sharing of organizational knowledge within communities. Using an affordance lens, we seek to understand the relationship between social media and organizations through exploring the enactment of organizational wiki affordances as well as the dynamics underlying their enactment. Based on data obtained from two multinational organizations, CCC and IBM, we first identified eight key affordances that describe various wiki possibilities and practices. We then identified four key properties of these affordances including multiplicity, referential, situatedness and communal. These properties essentially provide means to understand the enactment of affordances by capturing the dynamics involved in the ways people perceive, enact and exploit various affordances.