Making mundane work visible on social media: a CCO investigation of working out loud on Twitter

ABSTRACT

This article examines an emergent communicative practice called working out loud (WOL), defined as a process of narrating work during the course of its realisation, by studying instances of WOL on Twitter. Anchored in a relational ontology, our inquiry aims to investigate what these tweets, defined as sociomaterial agents, accomplish. Our results show that as a practice, WOL adopts a variety of forms. We link the actions achieved by the tweets to their inherent characteristics, hence documenting their agency. We show that WOL tweets are performative in that they make visible things that otherwise tend to remain hidden, private, or difficult to reveal in an explicit way. More precisely, through our CCO inquiry, we suggest that given the characteristics associated with these tweets and, more broadly, with that which Twitter enables or constrains, WOL tweets have the potential to actively participate in the constitution of work and professional identity of workers engaging in working out loud.

Keywords:

• Work
• working out loud (WOL)
• social media
• communicative constitution of organizations (CCO)
• visibility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The two authors dedicated approximately 1 hour per week to data collection during that period.

2. TweetDeck is a dashboard application that interfaces with the Twitter API in order to facilitate the management of Twitter accounts.

3. It is important to note that Twitter, Inc. makes only a fraction of its content available to the public and researchers through its search engine or APIs (i.e. the tools that can be used to access Twitter data). Indeed, ‘It is not clear what tweets are included in these different data streams’ (Boyd & Crawford, 2012, p. 669). In sum, no researcher can claim that the data collected on Twitter is representative of all public tweets, regardless of the means or tools used to access it.

4. See Appendix for details on how we distinguish ‘talk’ and ‘conversation’, given the specific forms that conversations take on Twitter.

5. The process of fashioning a self-brand on social media (Senft, 2013) can lead people to ‘tweak’ their identity in order to appear in a better light, or to select only the parts of themselves that they wish to present, to showcase only their best side, as exemplified by the case of the Australian Instagram personality Essena O’Neill, who revealed that everything she posted was edited and/or staged (Hunt, 2015). While acknowledging that these effects could be at play when people work out loud, we are not concerned with the authenticity of what people choose to present in their tweets. However, the issue of authenticity is important on social media and it would be interesting to take it into account in further studies about working out loud.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Viviane Sergi

Viviane Sergi is an associate professor at the Management and Technology Department at ESG UQAM, Canada. She holds a PhD in administration from HEC Montréal, Canada. Her research interests include project organising, new collaborative practices, performativity, leadership, and materiality. She also has a keen interest for methodological issues related to the practice of qualitative research. Her work has been published in Academy of Management Annals, Human Relations, Scandinavian Journal of Management, Long Range Planning, Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, and in the International Journal of Managing Projects in Business.

Claudine Bonneau

Claudine Bonneau is an associate professor at the Management and Technology Department at ESG UQAM, Canada, where she is a member of the Laboratory on Computer-Mediated Communication (LabCMO) and teaches in graduate and undergraduate programs in Information Technology. Her current work focuses on social media uses and online collaboration practices at work. She is also interested in methodological issues related to qualitative research and online ethnography. Besides her contributions to edited books (such as the Handbook of Social Media Research Methods, Sage, 2017), her work has been published in the International Journal of Project Management (2014), tic&société (2013), and other French language publications.