Emergence and mutability of social media work practices in organisational context

Social media technologies have offered new opportunities for organisations to relate to their external stakeholders such as customers. Notwithstanding the significant opportunities, the question of how organisations manage these technologies and their internal processes associated with them has been left unanswered. Adopting a practice lens, we have conducted a case study to examine how new work practices emerge and what the nature of these practices is. Furthermore, we have applied the concept of ‘technology-in-practice’ to understand the underlying dynamics of these emerging work practices and technology structures. In this research-in-progress paper, we have found that these work practices are mutable as the organisation’s actors continuously engage in improvisation and reflexive actions in response to changes in the technology or users’ behaviours. This improvising or reflexive acting of organisational actors makes the continuous changes in work practices inevitable, which render the social media management structure in continuous flux.