Social Technologies and Knowledge Sharing within and across Organizations

Abstract

This doctoral research empirically investigates the role of various social technologies in informal knowledge sharing practices within and across organizations. Social technologies include both (a) traditional social technologies (e.g., email, phone and instant messengers) and (b) emerging social networking technologies commonly known as social media such as blogs, wikis, major public social networking sites (i.e., Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), and enterprise social networking technologies employed behind a firewall. Building from sociomateriality research, I study how these social technologies, as a suite of tools, are used in combination. The primary outcome of this research is a more complete conceptualization of the role and value of various social technologies for knowledge sharing in organizational contexts, which still remains understudied within the CSCW arena.