South-East European Research Centre (SEERC)

A growing number of studies investigate how social software tools are being used inside organizations. However, and despite the popularity of the domain, social tools’ entanglement with everyday work remains an under-investigated and poorly theorized field. Established analytical foundations have privileged either humans or technology and downplayed the inextricable relation of the social as well as the material nature of everyday organizing, often leading to contradicting results and conceptual blur. The presentation will lay the basis for an inclusive and explanatory scheme to better understand, explain and predict the phenomenon of social software at workplace. In doing so, it will discuss the usefulness of treating social software not merely as a technological object with certain design properties, but as an interpretively flexible element constituted only inside the contexts in which it resides, as well as a constitutive ingredient of such conditions. Preliminary data from a case study, theoretical implications and future work intentions will be discussed.