Social Knowledge Environments

Knowledge management represents a key issue for both information systems’ academics and practitioners, including those who have become disillusioned by actual results that fail to deliver on exaggerated promises and idealistic visions. Social software, a tremendous global success story, has prompted similarly high expectations regarding the ways in which organizations can improve their knowledge handling. But can these expectations be met, whether in academic research or the real world? This article seeks to identify current research trends and gaps, with a focus on social knowledge environments. The proposed research agenda features four focal challenges: semi-permeable organizations, social software in professional work settings, crowd knowledge, and crossborder knowledge management. Three solutions emerge as likely methods to address these challenges: designoriented solutions, analytical solutions, and interdisciplinary dialogue

The impact of life changes on social media practices: An ethnographic study of young Chinese adults living in Australia

There are mainstream research focuses on how social media affect people's lives, the present study explores how people use social media when confronted with life changing events or circumstances, especially when living overseas. Being exposed to a new living environment in Australia, many young adults from other countries are faced with a range of challenges. These may include cultural barriers, language limitations, employment difficulties, and academic pressures. The interpersonal relationships of young adults and their technological mediations shift as they experience life changes. Drawing from long-term ethnographic research among young adults who moved from mainland China to Australia for further education or employment, I argue that social media are crucial in assisting young adults to navigate their life transitions. However, this plays out differently depending on the type of relationship and social context (friendship, love, family and work). I propose that with the affordances and the integrated communicative environment that polymedia (Madianou & Miller's 2013) provides, young adults living overseas present themselves and their life changes to diverse groups of people in different ways in order to mediate different types of ongoing relationships. This thesis contributes to the scholarship of interpersonal relationships and social media studies by exploring the digitally mediated communication of young adults going through life changes

Utilización de las nuevas tecnologías en comunicación interna: análisis del uso de los social media en la comunicación interna de las empresas españolas

Las organizaciones actuales se ven afectadas por los cambios constantes del entorno en el que operan. En este nuevo escenario la comunicación interna se ha convertido en un área estratégica clave en las empresas para la consecución de ventajas competitivas a través de sus empleados y para transmitir su imagen al exterior, en un mercado cada vez más exigente. Por otra, las herramientas Social Media han revolucionado los hábitos de comunicación corporativa, tanto externa como interna, por su capacidad para intercambiar información. El objetivo principal de esta tesis se centra en profundizar en el conocimiento del uso de los social media en la comunicación interna por parte de las empresas españolas, su capacidad para potenciar una comunicación bidireccional e interactiva, para trasladar los objetivos de la organización y la cultura corporativa y colaborar con ello a una mayor implicación y compromiso de los empleados con su organización. Se ha empleado una doble metodología, completando el análisis estadístico de la información obtenida a través de la encuesta enviada a los profesionales de comunicación de las empresas, con la técnica cualitativa del método DELPHI.Departamento de Economía Financiera y ContabilidadDoctorado en Economía de la Empresa2017-01-0