I went to a seminar on thursday at my departement (Departement for Cultural Sciences) at Lund University. The guestlecturer was Professor Fritz Betz, a sociologist from University of Applied Sciences in Burgenland. He spoke about concepts such as eCollaboration, Enterprise 2.0 and social media and the focus evolved around the internal use of these concepts which was illustrated by examples from his previous projects in 4 different companies.
According to Betz there seems to exist a kind of technological determinism among companies, which means that they want to implement eCollaboration tools and features from the social web eg. blogs, Wikis, forums and so on in order to achieve innovation, sociality and mobilisation. How this should be done, except from buying and installing eCollaboration tools, is often vauge and blurry among descionmakers within companies. The mere existence of social media is believed to create collaboration. According to Betz, this was only true to some extent within the companies where he had performed his research. Employees didn´t use the tools in the same way that they used social media privately. Often the communication was limitied to e-mail system or external forums (such as wikis).
This could be analyzed in a dozen of ways, but one reason for why eCollaboration tools in many companies does not work has to do with power and control, according to Betz. Employees are not keen on open discussions involving bosses on different levels, and different departments are not keen on letting material and info free because then they also need to decrease the level of control. Therefore, social media, eCollaboration and Enterprise 2.0 is merely "buzzwords" but the discourse around these concepts have changed the way we think and interact in organizations. The traditionally hierachical organization should nowadays be a network(ing) organization and the traditionally closed company is open. The divide between producer and consumer is blurred, we talk about prosumers, about crowsourcing and wisdom of the crowds, where consumers and employees is invited to the developement of the company or the organization.
The seminar did not give me any concrete insights in how to initiate people to become a part of ProPeace, but it did give me some hints about how Social media can become social. The participation need to be active, and the atmosphere of a ProPeace platform must inspire to that activation. It also need to be voluntarily and follow the principles of tranperancy, accessibility and personlisation. As Betz said; "social media is about social practices, they are not social in themselves". This means that a platform must offer the cues of practicing sociality. A user is not always aware of the bigger picture, that their use of a wiki, or blog actually forms and develops larger social movements. “One uses new (technological” tools without realising to what extent they influence ordinary life” (One of Betz informants).
Another important aspect is to create a "community of practices", whereas the community members together constructs a storytelling, a certain culture related to that place, which in turn creates a strong brand for the company/organization. For further information on this topic, I would like to suggest an article (unfortunately only available in Swedish) about the external use of social media by companies:
No comments:
Post a Comment