Social media and similar platforms have mainly been discussed as venues of work in two major ways. Either they are viewed as venues for monetizing fame and influence on the platform (e.g. Duffy, 2017; Glatt, 2022) or by people taking platformized jobs in the gig economy (e.g. Pasquale, 2016; Reschauer & Mair, 2018; Scholz, 2017). In this paper, I examine a third option: Bringing social media platforms into already existing, traditional workplaces in the form of so-called enterprise social media (ESM) (Leonardi et al 2013). I do this via a case study of the ESM Workplace from Meta, developed by the creators of Facebook, and analogous to that medium in affordances and looks. My empirical materials consist of interviews with 30 users of Workplace across a variety of organizations, and a reading of 242 promotional texts produced by Meta or their partners, along with 42 news items mentioning the platform.

I examine the promises and limitations of trying to reshape working life via ESMs in the emancipatory image of early tech optimist accounts of networked media (cf. Shirky, 2008; Morozov, 2011). I argue that the constitution of the organizations empirically using Workplace is by no means a great reimagining of professional organizations (cf. Cheney et al 2014; Gawer, 2022). I thus conclude by discussing the proximate causes for why an ESM may only be a limited way of reimagining workplaces – especially if it entails neither a rethinking of the governance of platforms (ESM) or of professional organizations as such.

References:


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