Visions of Social Media: Surfacing Schemas from Firms' Informational Engagements

Prior research has noted the salience of informational engagements that culminate in an organizing vision to the diffusion of technology and the value firms garner from the technology. In contrast to sociological theories that view meaning as inherently pluralistic, information technology research has espoused a single community-level organizing vision. Drawing upon schema theory, we posit that different schemas or organizing visions underlie firms’ informational engagements. We consider the constitutive cognitive elements of these schemas in terms of six evaluative principles derived from six prototypical “orders of worth.” We apply relational class analysis to surface the schemas reflected in informational engagements about 675 social media initiatives by 26 of the top 30 Fortune firms. Contrary to extant perspectives on organizing vision, we identified four disparate schemas or visions of social media and observed firms’ informational engagements typically to reflect multiple visions.