ILPC 2026

In this paper we will explore two well-established aspects of social media (its relationship to political and social resistance and its role in contemporary knowledge work) to illustrate how social media are being used by knowledge workers to create meaningful working cultures that go beyond the boundaries of a single work organization (see Parker 2006), to act out professional identities (see Pratt, 2006), and to engage in acts of everyday resistance (see Korchynski, 2011).  By exploring the use of social media among a set of knowledge workers without being limited to a single organizational setting, the contribution of our research is to demonstrate how new media, with their own modes of representation, can open up virtual public spaces for new forms of communication and resistance that are distinct from those explored in the current literature.  We argue that knowledge workers, as “digital natives” who engage in free-lance and project working, stand at the vanguard of these innovations.

Analysing social media requires us to develop new methods of organizational analysis.  Social media methodologies are currently being developed among a number of disciplines including, human-computer interaction, linguistics and media and communications. The majority of work related social media research has focused on usage within single organisations (e.g. IBM, Ehrlich and Shami, 2010 and Turner et al, 2010; Microsoft, Skeels and Grudin, 2009 and Archambault and Grudin, 2012), providing insight to frequency of use, changes in behaviour and management concerns for use. Publicly available social media overcome physical and organisational boundaries, are adopted widely, and, given the equally ubiquitous adoption of smart phones, make it almost impossible for managers to restrict and monitor individual usage. It is not clear how or what value publicly available social media has to knowledge work, despite evidence that it is considered useful by workers (Ferro, Divine and Zachry, 2012). Whilst Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are the most popular social media sites, this research focuses on Twitter. Twitter allows users to express 140 characters of information and is considered to have four genres: media sharing, micro-blogging, network creating and a social marking (Ferro, et al 2012). A growing number of studies have been conducted utilising Twitter data. Rogers (2013) reported on Twitter research to date and how it had evolved alongside their Tagline. In 2009 this moved from “what are you doing?” to “what’s happening?” with research following suit from shallow commentary (e.g. micro-celebrity, Marwick and Boyd, 2011) to interpretations of specific events (e.g. #occupy, Nielson, 2013), to what is now deemed researching Twitter as an archived data set. Few studies have focused specifically on how Twitter impacts knowledge work, resistance, consent and compromise. Yet, an annual survey of US knowledge workers conducted between 2008 and 2011 reported that 19% of those sampled suggested that Twitter was useful for their work (12% of home workers and 21% of office workers) (Ferro et al 2012).

This exploratory research uses Twitter as an archived data set and analyses almost 4000 tweets made over a three-month period relevant to a specific industry community of practice surrounding agency work. #agencywork received a lot of publicity following its emergence in early 2013 and continues to receive tweets daily. Looking at the profiles of these agency workers #agencywork Tweeters include advertising, marketing, digital designers, press relations, graphic designers and software developers. They are distributed workers working in a single industry, spanning many organisations and locations. Descriptive analysis demonstrates that workers share knowledge, experiences and angst. In-depth qualitative analyses of the Tweets demonstrate that Twitter is used to reflect on working life as an extension of co-located learning and socialisation. The value of Twitter to knowledge workers, organisational researchers, and a changing work landscape is discussed in this paper.