Towards a Model of Employee Weblog Usage: A Process-Oriented Analysis of Antecedents and Consequences

Towards a Model of Employee Weblog Usage: A Process-Oriented Analysis of Antecedents and Consequences

Philip Raeth (EBS Universität für Wirtschaft und Recht, Germany) and Stefan Smolnik (EBS Universität für Wirtschaft und Recht, Germany)
Copyright: © 2011 |Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/ijsodit.2011070103

Abstract

The recent rise of Web 2.0 ideas, principles, and applications has significantly affected the communication and interaction in social networks. While Web 2.0’s Internet usage and benefits have been investigated, certain questions are still unanswered: whether benefits such as enhanced collaboration and knowledge sharing also apply in an organizational context and whether there are more, still uncovered, benefits. Since research on the corporate adoption and use of Web 2.0 technologies is still in its early stages, neither qualitative nor quantitative models that could provide answers have been proposed. As a starting point for further developing this research stream, the authors collected and reviewed the literature on internal corporate blogging. Then the framework by Ives et al. (1980) was chosen to categorize the identified 25 articles for further analysis. The paper describes building a conceptual model and identifying the antecedents and consequences of employee weblog usage within corporations. The findings of the review suggest that employee blogging in corporations is a social and an organizational phenomenon. Individual perceptions and attitudes, peers, and cultures have a crucial influence on weblog usage, while the organization and its culture provide a framework.
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Foundations

Corporate Weblogs

Weblogs are websites in which an author, or a group of authors, publishes articles sporadically, or at regular intervals. Weblogs on the Internet are often created by individuals or small groups. To date, research on weblogs has focused on the motivations for blogging (Nardi, Schiano, Gumbrecht, & Swartz, 2004), the genres, and types – such as use within public relations and politics (Kelleher, 2008; Trammell, 2007) –, as wells as technical aspects (Du & Wagner, 2006). The number of corporate weblogs is increasing steadily (Du & Wagner, 2006) and their application areas are very diverse. Some corporate weblogs are only for internal use, but companies also apply this technology to market communications and public relation tasks (Cross et al., 2005).

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