The influence of social media on processes, structure and strategies within organisations.

In the last two decades, business organisations have seen the emergence and rise of social media platforms that are fundamentally different from traditional Information Technologies. During this time, the use of social media by organisations has advanced from experimentation to become a mainstream activity within the organisation. Despite the influence and advancement in the use of social media in business organisations, the existing literature suggests that organisations are struggling with organising and managing social media as well as understanding what broader changes in the organisational structure and processes are necessary for implementing social media in the organisation. This suggests that organisations are struggling to integrate social media within organisational processes and structure as well as in developing a social media strategy within the organisation. This research aims to explore the influence of social media on processes, structure and strategy within the organisation. Respectively, the intention is to explore social media practices within the organisation using the ‘strategy as practice’ perspective to understand how social media practices affect processes, structure and strategies within the organisation. Guided by the interpretivist philosophy, twenty-two semi-structured interviews were conducted in this study with staff and managers from two case study telecommunication organisations in Tanzania: Kili and Mwiko (pseudonyms). The data collected was analysed using the reflexive thematic method. The thesis findings highlight several contributions to knowledge. First, it highlights that context, competition and behaviours influence how social media is embedded in processes, structure and strategy within an organisation. Second, this research highlights that the influence of social media on organisational processes is mainly through knowledge sharing. Third, this research demonstrates that planned social media practices are influenced by structure whereas emergent social media practices influence structure. In addition, this research contributes to knowledge on IS strategy by identifying seven elements of social media strategy development that are: adoption, recognition, structure, strategizing, resources, management and processes. Furthermore, this research contributes to knowledge about practice by offering insights on how organisations can manage and maximise the influence of social media on processes and strategy through providing IT training and skills to their employees and how informal organisational practices can enhance knowledge management. Finally, the research shows how flexible structures can enhance social media practices, especially planned social media practices. Limitations and directions for future research are also presented

A Generic Agent Organisation Framework For Autonomic Systems

Autonomic computing is being advocated as a tool for managing large, complex computing systems. Specifically, self-organisation provides a suitable approach for developing such autonomic systems by incorporating self-management and adaptation properties into large-scale distributed systems. To aid in this development, this paper details a generic problem-solving agent organisation framework that can act as a modelling and simulation platform for autonomic systems. Our framework describes a set of service-providing agents accomplishing tasks through social interactions in dynamically changing organisations. We particularly focus on the organisational structure as it can be used as the basis for the design, development and evaluation of generic algorithms for self-organisation and other approaches towards autonomic systems

Learning organisations: A literature review and critique

Approved for Public Release - UnclassifiedA literature review on the Learning Organisation field was conducted, examining the dominant assumptions and creating a solid foundation for the practical application of the learning organisation concept to the Australian Army. In order to examine the literature's dominant assumptions, we asked the following questions: (i) What are the various meanings attributed to learning organisations?; (ii) What sorts of learnings are privileged within the literature?; (iii) What are the key characteristics or "building blocks" that make up a learning organisation? We discovered that the learning organisation construct represents an evolution from bureaucratic and performance-based organisational form to innovative and flexible organisations. In surveying the literature, other factors found to impact on learning organisations included cognitive, social, cultural, technological and structural elements. For example, learning organisations apply increasingly sophisticated understanding of knowledge and personnel management to best exploit their social, intellectual and knowledge capital. In contrast, some factors are not adequately explored in the literature; for example, the significance of power relations, hierarchy and authority on learning within and by organisations has not been fully elucidated. There is an increasing number of studies investigating the direct impact of developing a learner-centric approach on organisational outcomes; the number of studies linking learning to improved organisational performance is growing. There are real, significant and measureable benefits of developing the learning capabilities of an organisation.Steven Talbot, Christina Stothard, Maya Drobnjak and Denise McDowal

Impossible organisations: anarchism and organisational praxis

Organisational scholarship tends to focus its attention mainly on conventional work organisations and so neglects the organisational practices and principles of other sites of organising. The paper considers the implications of this limited focus even within more critical scholarship through a close reading of a recent paper calling for a greater engagement with social movements. Specifically, I consider problems of understanding a phenomenon in terms of what it is not and evaluating alternative sites of organisation using conventional categories of analysis. I then go on to outline the potential contribution of anarchist theory and its enactment by recent anti-capitalist movements. These radically different approaches to organisation are evaluated and I argue that they present a profound challenge to mainstream assumptions. The paper concludes that critical organisational theory has much to learn from an engagement with such alternative sites of organisation but only if a determined attempt is made to move beyond the usual theoretical frameworks and that anarchist theory may help us do this

On Relations between Government and Non-profits: The Case of Slovakia

In this chapter, we look at non-profits and civil society as a transit zone for solidarity acts, social innovations and initiatives to influence social policy by means of co-creation and collaboration with government (public sector organisations). The aim is to present collaboration practices between public sector organisations, non-governmental organisation, social economy organisations and citizens, known as co-creation, with a focus on drivers and barriers of this collaboration in Slovakia. The chapter focuses on channelling solidarity produced by non-profits into social policy through co-creation. Introducing the solidarity economy approach allows us to evaluate the relationships between the government sector and non-profit organisations from a broader societal perspective including both economic and democratic dimensions