New research paper on employee blogging

I've just come across a paper published earlier this year on employee blogging.

General details can be found here.

Some details of the study (provided by Business Wire):

The authors looked at bloggers in Fortune 500 IT consulting and services companies that permitted both leisure- and work-related blogging, and studied work environments where the company prohibits leisurely blogging.

They found that when organizations put restrictions on leisure blogging, online work-related knowledge sharing decreases.

The authors believe this happens because creating social media content at work not only helps employees to educate those seeking information, but also helps them build social relationships in the workplace.

An employee can attract fellow employees to his blog with an entertaining or leisure post and, because work-related posts are on the same page, there is a spillover effect with people reading work-related articles.

The actual paper can be found here: A Structural Model of Employee Behavioral Dynamics in Enterprise Social Media by Yan Huang, Param Vir Singh and Anindya Ghose.

More work-related blog research...

For the second month in succession is a new research article on work-related blogs.

It's by Abigail Schoneboom again.

The title of the article is Workblogging in a Facebook age.

The abstract is as follows:

In keeping with this journal’s recent attempt to revive worker narratives as a means of understanding social questions, this research note reflects on the significance of workblogging as a window on the labour process.

The article reflects on the impact of emerging social networking tools such as Facebook, as well as factors such as increased surveillance and blog searchability, on how and where workplace stories are told.

It assesses some of the problems of conducting research in a rapidly changing blogosphere and argues that researchers must sustain trusting relationships with bloggers, as well as staying abreast of emerging social networking practices, in order not to lose sight of these important recalcitrant voices.

For more details of the said article click here.

New research paper on employee Internet use

I've just finished a paper I intend to present to a conference in the USA early next week - see details.

The paper is entitled: The employee and the Internet age: A reflection, map and research agenda.

A copy can be viewed here.

And some details:

The main aim of this paper is to provide a systematic review of the burgeoning, yet far from cohesive, literature that surrounds employee use of the Internet, with view to reflecting upon the extent to which employees have more broadly (or not) benefitted in the Internet age.

This is achieved by drawing on a range of literature associated with the study of employment and work organisations. Due to the nature of Internet communication technologies and how this conflicts with the much slower nature of academic output, the review and mapping exercise is supplemented by press reports of emergent employee uses for new forms of Internet-based communication technologies, such as blogs, social networking sites and wikis.

The review is based on examining the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and followed by an overall discussion of important employee-related changes that characterise the shift from the old to the new Internet.

The main conclusion of the review is that the Internet represents a “double-edged” sword, yet the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 appears to have opened up fresh and exciting opportunities for employees to engage with their jobs, misbehave, shape trade union practices, and, challenge managerialist discourses.

Finally, the findings are diagrammatically mapped out, the limits of the study are discussed and a range of important research opportunities and challenges are presented.

I'd be more than happy to receive comments on my paper!