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Social Software, Strategic Management & Dynamic Capabilities

The doctoral program I’m in right now is called Dynamic Capabilities and Relationships, in short DCR. I’ve been trying for a while to make connections between the phenomenon I’m interested in, i.e. social software use in organizations, and strategic management. With publications like the one below from Haefliger and colleagues, bridges are being built and the path from the former to the latter is being made visible. I did not come across any work to date, however, that would explicity address the link between social software use and its implications on (the strategic management concept of) Dynamic Capabilities. Reading the below passage in a MISQ comment by Ann Majchrzak got me really excited:

Yet many contributors to organizational wikis […] organize others’ contributions not for social exchange or social capital motives, but instead because they are genuinely concerned about the organization’s ability to adapt to the needs of a volatile environment (Majchrzak et al. 2006). Not only should findings like this encourage us as researchers to rethink social exchange and social capital theories, but they also should encourage researchers in other domains, such as dynamic capabilities models (Eisenhardt and Martin 2000) to modify their theories to include information shaping as an important dynamic capability of a firm.

We’ll have Jeff Martin, the second author of the latter paper quoted my Majchrzak, over in Berlin in a couple of weeks and I’ll make sure to bring this issue up while he’s here. In case you’re interested, here’s an interview with him about the paper mentioned above and the idea behind Dynamic Capabilities: Jeffrey Martin on competing in fast-moving dynamic environments.

References:

Eisenhardt Kathleen, M., & Martin Jeffrey, A. (2000). Dynamic capabilities: What are they. Strategic Management Journal, 21(10/11), 1105–1121.

Haefliger, S., Monteiro, E., Foray, D., & von Krogh, G. (2011). Social Software and Strategy. Long Range Planning, 44(5-6), 297–316. doi:10.1016/j.lrp.2011.08.001

Majchrzak, A., Wagner, C., & Yates, D. (2006). Corporate wiki users: results of a survey. Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Wikis, WikiSym  ’06 (pp. 99–104). New York, NY, USA: ACM. doi:10.1145/1149453.1149472

Majchrzak, A. (2009). Comment: Where is the Theory in Wikis? Management Information Systems Quarterly, 33(1), 18–20.

Ways to Use Copyrighted (Academic) Content for Blogging

While working on a blog post the other day, I asked myself (once again) how academic material taken from (copyrighted) journals and books, may be used (legally and appropriately) by researchers like myself. I’ve attempted to find an answer to this question on various occasions, but it seems that every publisher has guidelines on its own. Asking a law professor at our business school brought some relief. I further contacted a few publishers via Twitter and I’ve been pleased with the responsiveness of Oxford University Press, for example. However, their clearance process is too cumbersome to work with in practice. On the same day, I discovered a very useful guide published by Elsevier: Ways to Use Journal Articles: A Practical Guide. Posting the link to Twitter, it was re-tweeted several times, an indicator of its usefulness to other researchers, I suppose. Therefore, I decided to include the link to the guide on my blog and add an abstract of the relevant section below. If you come across similar documents, please drop me a line. I would surely like to have a look at them.

Anyone may in written work quote from an article published by Elsevier, as long as the quote comprises only a short excerpt such as one or two sentences. An appropriate citation, including the journal title, must be provided. If the intended use is for scholarly comment, noncommercial research or educational purposes, an institution or academic may, without seeking permission from Elsevier, use: 

  • a single text extract of fewer than 100 words or a series of extracts totaling no more than 300 words
  • a maximum of two figures from a journal article or a total of five from a journal volume

These guidelines reflect Elsevier’s endorsement of the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers’ 2008 guidelines for quotation and other academic uses of excerpts from journal articles. Find more details on these guidelines at www.stm-assoc.org/document-library/ (see Guidelines for Quotations from Journal Articles).

Social Software & Strategy: A Review & Research Agenda

A couple of days ago, I commented on a research framework on social media by Kietzmann and colleagues published in the Journal of Public Affairs. I had another article sitting on my desk which was similar in scope. It’s been written by Haefliger and colleagues and served as the introduction to as special isssue of the journal Longe Range Planning. Haefliger and colleagues distinguish between strategy (value creation & value appropriation), technology (technology as a tool vs a mediator), and community (leadership & boundaries). Furthermore, they look at social software use from an internal and an external perspective. I find this structure more appealing and intuitive than the honeycomb presented earlier. A nice additional feature is the research agenda they produce. I’ve included both tables below.

Haefliger et al

Haefliger et al

Reference:

Haefliger, S., Monteiro, E., Foray, D., & von Krogh, G. (2011). Social Software and Strategy. Long Range Planning, 44(5-6), 297–316. doi:10.1016/j.lrp.2011.08.001

Unpacking the Social Media Phenomenon

I received a Google Alert to a new social media article by Kietzmann and colleagues yesterday morning. Having a brief look at it, I was intrigued by the social media honeycomb they produced with theories listed in each domain of functionality, including research questions that should be addressed in the future. You can find the honeycomb and the research agenda below. Trying to trace the development of the honeycomb, I came across another recent article by a similar set set of authors. Digging a bit deeper, I realized that the honeycomb has been around for a while. The earliest version I found was published by nform, a consultancy, in 2007. While the framework does not seem to be particularly innovative, I appreciate the authors’ effort to establish a research agenda for the field of social media. Let’s see if the suggested questions will be picked up by other researchers in the future or whether some of the combs will disappear or change over time.

References:

Kietzmann, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons, 54(3), 241–251. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2011.01.005

Kietzmann, J. H., Silvestre, B. S., McCarthy, I. P., & Pitt, L. (2012). Unpacking the social media phenomenon: towards a research agenda. Journal of Public Affairs. doi:10.1002/pa.1412