From Mass Production to Mass Collaboration: Institutionalized Hindrances to Social Platforms in the Workplace

This article addresses the importance of institutionalized practices when social media are introduced as collective platforms for the workplace and why the great engagement envisioned for these tools has yet to be realized in organizational settings. Innovation, in this article, points to practices that individuals perceive as new. Innovation thus also concerns social changes: the introduction of new practices to be employed by individuals within social structures. The dynamics in the workplace and in distributed networks (e.g. Wikipedia) are compared and found to operate with different social structures, with different practices at play, yet collective and engaging actions are expected from employees with the introduction of social platforms. The nature of our notion of work in the workplace is colored by organization and measurement in time and money derived from a capitalistic paradigm, yet drivers at play in distributed networks are not measured in quantitative terms (time and money), but on quality (good work, strong reputation, high social status, and so forth). The article points to findings from a comprehensive qualitative case study of knowledge workers employed in a knowledge-intensive organization in twenty-three countries in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Twenty-seven in-depth interviews and field studies of professional knowledge-workers in Norway, Denmark, UK and Morocco was conducted during 2011, with follow-up interviews of eight of the participants from Morocco and Norway after one year. Many of the employees in our study explain that the company’s social platform becomes just another thing to track amidst in an already hectic workday where individual drivers triumph over collective priorities.