Developmental Paper presented within the Identity track at the British Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2012.

1. BAM Developmental Paper – 13th September 2012
Social Media, The Organisation and Me
An Exploration of Identity Work by Employees in the Digital Age
Chris James Carter
Lee Martin
Claire O’Malley

2. Why?
• Social media technologies = social networking; content
sharing; blogging; micro-blogging
• Hugely pervasive
• Increasingly prevalent use of social media for professional
purposes
• Organisations increasingly monitor the digital identities of
individuals to help inform decisions with „real world‟
professional consequences (e.g. recruitment and discipline)
• However, very little theoretical or empirical research to date
examines mediated identity work within a professional context
• Also very little research on identity and social media that goes
beyond the application of a dramaturgical approach
• What are the individual, social and technological factors that
influence the process of identity work?

3. Core Research Question
How does the use of social media by employees
impact upon the ways in which they engage in
identity work?

4. Themes underpinning interview Qs
• Professional use
What, how and why are social media used for professional purposes? What
are the opportunities and challenges for the individual? What norms of use
exist and how do they influence online interaction?
• Personal identity
To what extent is digital identity representative of one‟s self? Does this vary
across different forms of social media?
• Social identity
How is the expression of group membership managed? What factors
influence this?
• Mediated identity work
How do individuals manage impressions? Who are the salient audiences and
what is their role? What technological factors influence this?

5. Method
• UK Higher Education Institute
• 14 semi-structured interviews
- Saturation
- Pragmatism
• Sample = Users of social media
employed by the HEI
- Variation in experience of use
- Academic and Professional Services roles
Managerial and non-managerial positions
- Early and later stages of career
• Access to organisational social
media guidelines

6. Analysis
• Full transcription of audio recordings
- Approx. 90,000 words
• Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006)
- Codes  Themes  Relation to existing theories
• Document Analysis of organisational social
media guidelines
- General guidelines rather than prescriptive

7. Overview of findings
• professional use of social media
What
- All used Facebook, most used Twitter and LinkedIn, some used blogs
Why
- Social interaction
- Reflection
- Information-seeking
- Broadcasting

8. Theme #1: Caution
• Perceptions of risk
• Higher risk = humour, political expression, criticism
• Representing self, representing the organisation - disclaimers
• Influenced by use of other professional users and media reports… though not so much by
organisational guidelines
“I always think, erm... How is this going to look if it's quoted in the newspaper? And is
this gonna [pauses] compromise the University? Crudely, am I going to lose my job?”
[I think] what are you going to get from this post? You know, is it going to actually
improve the number of people who follow me or like me, is the actual reward
going to be greater than the backlash if it might be a little controversial?
• Decision making
• Anticipated outcomes
• Expected utility
“If I were in a more junior management position, I would be very careful about
some of the things that I do. And when you've got a long career in front of you,
you've got to be really, really careful I think.
• Career stage
• Greater restriction at earlier stages
• Consideration of future implications for identity

9. Theme #2: Motivation
• Regulatory focus
• Promotion-focus (cf. opportunities)
• Prevention-focus (cf. challenges)
• Opportunities
• Self-promotion
• Organisational promotion
• Knowledge
• Contextual information
• Challenges
• Misinterpretation
• Maintaining integrity
• Avoiding inappropriateness
• Consistency
“You know, I'm under no illusion that
at the end of September I'm actually
going to be unemployed so err,
yeah, networking I guess is probably
number one priority. I find it really,
really interesting that I can look at
what other peers and academics
are looking at and perhaps refer to
that in interviews.”
“I think there's a constant tension
between wanting to go 'this is me,
this is who I am' and at the other end
of the spectrum going 'well, people
who are going to potentially employ
me are going to see this„. So yeah, it's
difficult I think to find a balance.”

10. Theme #3: Emotional Regulation
• Emotion-based state in using social media
• Taking time to „neutralise‟ emotional state
• Deriving positive emotion, such as confidence, from online interactions
• Anxiety from others outside of chosen network seeing personal content, being
disconnected, looking misinformed and being misinterpreted
• Embarrassment from making mistakes and sharing too much personal information when
using social media in an organisational capacity
“[Common sense is] probably not posting if you're feeling emotional about
anything as well, because I think what you quite often see is people wearing their
heart on their sleeves. Just calm down and put your status the next day.”
• Emotion-based content upon social media
• Context is key to understanding the relevance of previous emotional content
• Avoidance of „over-sharing‟ too much personal information
“Your emotions, erm, are very much driven by the moment. And what might have
appeared to be really the end of the world at one point, you know, two or three
years down the line you think, 'what was that all about?„”

11. Theme #4: Fidelity
• Authenticity
• Perceptions varied according to the specific platform, but shared a
commonality through the perceived importance of authenticity
• Acceptable for accentuate positive content and suppress negative
content…
• … though inauthentic expression (e.g. too much self-promotion, too much
censorship, „fake‟ profiles) is perceived unfavourably
• Anonymity is possible (though difficult) and can enable authentic expression
• Integrity
• Balancing honesty and integrity with tact and an appreciation of the
appropriateness of the medium for professional feedback
• For some, influences strategy of whether to have separate personal and
professional profiles
“I mean […] you've got to be authentic right? Because lying is very difficult, adopting a
different persona constantly and forever more in one's frame of existence is very, very
difficult. You can't manage it, I mean, you know, we can't do that.”
“It's very hard to be [pauses] honest in a professional environment. You know, if part of
our job as academics is to have integrity to our beliefs, our opinions […] and yet, that
professional context is imposing itself, err, because of the interconnectedness of using
social media to do this.”

12. Technological factors underpinning the main themes
• Different platforms, different purposes
• LinkedIn wholly professional; Facebook more personal and „safe‟; Twitter mix of
professional and personal
• Control over audience composition and privacy
• Greater caution described in use of Twitter
• Expectations
• Need to post content regularly and quickly
• Spatiality
• Control over visibility (e.g. through privacy settings)
• Awareness of „virality‟
• Selective audience composition; audience „co-presence‟
• Temporality
• Instantaneousness of medium vs. considered action
• Reflection on past interactions
• Amendment/deletion/editing of undesirable data

13. Addressing the Research Question
How does the use of social media by employees impact upon the ways
in which they engage in identity work?
Importance of the pre-content decision making process
- Anticipated utility of particular aspects of self-expression
- Focus on rationality, minimisation of irrationality (particularly emotion)
Greater role of risk and cautious behaviour
- Identification of risk factors
- Exemplified through use by others; media reports
Awareness of how past identities might impact on current/future identity
- Deletion or modification of past content; beliefs about how content might look to others
in the future
Emphasis on ‘ought’ rather than ‘ideal’ expressions
- Perceived congruency of self-expression with standards or professional „norms‟ of use
Awareness of the potential for all aspects of identity to be monitored by
organisations
- Different platforms for different purposes; different levels of „safety‟
- Privacy controls; trust in technology

14. Next steps?
• Framing and Regulatory Focus
• What effects might framing have on the type of regulatory focus that employees adopt
when engaging in identity work?
• How might congruency/incongruency of chronic regulatory focus with induced focus
from framing impact on the expression of high risk content (defined by norms of
„inappropriate use‟)?
• Similarly, how might congruency/incongruency of regulatory focus impact on the
perceived salience of preserved online expressions of identity? Does the salience of a
behaviour diminish over time, as it might in human memory? Does this have an impact on
the strategies we might adopt for assimilating or rejecting it from current self-concepts?
• Employment status and Regulatory Focus
• Employees in the current study seemed to be largely prevention-focused (approach non-
losses/avoid losses to ensure continued employment), though some were promotion-
focused (approach gains/avoid non-gains, typically in roles that involved lack of job
security or where a professional reputation had already been established).
• Might this balance shift in the different motivational contexts of pre- and post-
organisational entry? How might active job-seekers manage risk if adopting a largely
promotion-focused strategies of identity work?