Social Media @ Work
Lecture 1 – The changing nature of work
What is work?
- 50 years ago we would look at more practical stuff, more in industrial sites, papers instead
of computers, mostly men
- Now we see more offices and laptops and more diversity
Changing nature of work
- Before 1700 = premodernity
- 90% in agriculture and to sustain themselves
- 1700-1960 = modernity
- More in factories
- 1960+ = late modernity
- Information based economy: we deal with information
- Handling information in a report or in a lecture
- To work more efficiently we made information technologies
- Social media is one of them
- Work has changed quite a bit
The future of work
- How has work & organization of work changed due to the pandemic?
- Fewer boundaries between work and home/private life
- Family roles more mixed up
- Employee commitment
- Organizations have to be more flexible and based on trust
- More working at home
- Work-life balance changes: more stress + overworked more easily
- Little separation between fun and work, which is a risk for your mental
wellbeing
- More support from organizations helping people to cope with the balance
- Less interaction with colleagues
- Less travel time
- Leadership will change because people work together remotely in virtual teams
- The teams need to be managed
- Requires different type of leadership
- Transactional leadership: more old-fashion, do this and then in this
way
- Transformational leadership: soft, more skills, motivate them to work,
set end goals
→ More towards this
- Management & coordination
- Less feedback and less keeping in touch with colleagues
- Socializing with them
- Virtual teamwork: team cooperation & identity/performance/social capital
- Online: no cues and no face-to-face
- Easier to forget about it or to not show up
1
, - Less sense of urgency to get there
- Psychological less sense of being with others
- More freeriding in virtual teams because someone “doesn’t have internet”
- You can become indifferent to your team because you don’t know them
socially
- How to connect?
- Attention to loneliness
- How do you think Gen Z (you) will work differently compared to previous generations?
- We’re okay with flexible locations
- We speak a lot of different languages → end up speaking English and adapt quicker
- Common culture/globalization
- Less loyalty (= increased flexibility) and more job switching
- We are looking for more than money, more to develop ourselves and identity-based
(internal motivation, not just external)
- Ask a lot of questions, create own way to approach things, show initiative, more
pro-active
- Might also be a cultural thing, not just an age thing
- We expect a more transformational type of leadership
- We value social responsibility of organization, question morality more
- Want to be more flexible, but have technology to allow/force possibility to create
that
- LinkedIn for example affords us that possibility
- Digital natives: tech savvy
- Social media in the workplace/less reliance on traditional channels
- Better communicators?
- Network structure of organization/communication channels
- Less committed to single employer
- Network-based organization/flexwork/knowledge management
- Difficult to distinguish between age and generational differences
- Very little difference in work attitudes & preferred use of communication technology
- Start using email more when working
2
,- Lot of texting with friends
- Personal phones: difficulty managing work and private life
3
, - Easily distracted
- Work-life balance has been an issue for much longer
- Might help to have a separate work phone since it creates a boundary
Networked individualism
- More scientific view on what happens in society and how it changes
Distinguished three eras in society
1. Early industrialized society (1900): people bound up in groups or “little boxes”
- Locally based in own little village and everything they did was in that little box
- Interacted with few people
- Few groups with clear boundaries
- Hierarchically and structured
- Social activity bound by place and time
- People hardly went anywhere
- Dominant mode of communication: face-to-face (door-to-door)
- Also how organizations were organized
- Work for long period in organization (look at 1960s)
2. ‘Glocalized’ networks (1960-2000): easier for people to communicate and socialize across
boxes
- People in different places and multiple social networks
- Society becomes increasingly connected
- Still in little boxes, mostly still in fixed groups BUT do have networks
- How we live now
- Not based on location anymore
- Psychological neighborhoods: communities based on common interest
- Social networks disembedded from ‘place’
- Physical place less and less important
- But it still remains important as home and work places are the bases → place-
to-place connectivity
- Dominant mode of communication: fixed telephone, mail, fax and internet (by end of 20th
century → email)
- The bike really changed the way how people could organize themselves
- You could reach next village, your world got bigger
- Scared of losing social cohesion because of it
- Now we also have the electrical scooter (Go/Check/Felyx) & Uber
- Glocalized = between global and local
- Easier to become member of other networks (global)
- But still main way to organize themselves is still in little boxes (local)
- This is how people prefer to live and how we live right now
3. Networked individualism (21st century, emerging)
- We will lose the little boxes and we become more individuals in a network
- Person-to-person connectivity
- More individually based, not across boxes
- Rapid switching between networks
4
Lecture 1 – The changing nature of work
What is work?
- 50 years ago we would look at more practical stuff, more in industrial sites, papers instead
of computers, mostly men
- Now we see more offices and laptops and more diversity
Changing nature of work
- Before 1700 = premodernity
- 90% in agriculture and to sustain themselves
- 1700-1960 = modernity
- More in factories
- 1960+ = late modernity
- Information based economy: we deal with information
- Handling information in a report or in a lecture
- To work more efficiently we made information technologies
- Social media is one of them
- Work has changed quite a bit
The future of work
- How has work & organization of work changed due to the pandemic?
- Fewer boundaries between work and home/private life
- Family roles more mixed up
- Employee commitment
- Organizations have to be more flexible and based on trust
- More working at home
- Work-life balance changes: more stress + overworked more easily
- Little separation between fun and work, which is a risk for your mental
wellbeing
- More support from organizations helping people to cope with the balance
- Less interaction with colleagues
- Less travel time
- Leadership will change because people work together remotely in virtual teams
- The teams need to be managed
- Requires different type of leadership
- Transactional leadership: more old-fashion, do this and then in this
way
- Transformational leadership: soft, more skills, motivate them to work,
set end goals
→ More towards this
- Management & coordination
- Less feedback and less keeping in touch with colleagues
- Socializing with them
- Virtual teamwork: team cooperation & identity/performance/social capital
- Online: no cues and no face-to-face
- Easier to forget about it or to not show up
1
, - Less sense of urgency to get there
- Psychological less sense of being with others
- More freeriding in virtual teams because someone “doesn’t have internet”
- You can become indifferent to your team because you don’t know them
socially
- How to connect?
- Attention to loneliness
- How do you think Gen Z (you) will work differently compared to previous generations?
- We’re okay with flexible locations
- We speak a lot of different languages → end up speaking English and adapt quicker
- Common culture/globalization
- Less loyalty (= increased flexibility) and more job switching
- We are looking for more than money, more to develop ourselves and identity-based
(internal motivation, not just external)
- Ask a lot of questions, create own way to approach things, show initiative, more
pro-active
- Might also be a cultural thing, not just an age thing
- We expect a more transformational type of leadership
- We value social responsibility of organization, question morality more
- Want to be more flexible, but have technology to allow/force possibility to create
that
- LinkedIn for example affords us that possibility
- Digital natives: tech savvy
- Social media in the workplace/less reliance on traditional channels
- Better communicators?
- Network structure of organization/communication channels
- Less committed to single employer
- Network-based organization/flexwork/knowledge management
- Difficult to distinguish between age and generational differences
- Very little difference in work attitudes & preferred use of communication technology
- Start using email more when working
2
,- Lot of texting with friends
- Personal phones: difficulty managing work and private life
3
, - Easily distracted
- Work-life balance has been an issue for much longer
- Might help to have a separate work phone since it creates a boundary
Networked individualism
- More scientific view on what happens in society and how it changes
Distinguished three eras in society
1. Early industrialized society (1900): people bound up in groups or “little boxes”
- Locally based in own little village and everything they did was in that little box
- Interacted with few people
- Few groups with clear boundaries
- Hierarchically and structured
- Social activity bound by place and time
- People hardly went anywhere
- Dominant mode of communication: face-to-face (door-to-door)
- Also how organizations were organized
- Work for long period in organization (look at 1960s)
2. ‘Glocalized’ networks (1960-2000): easier for people to communicate and socialize across
boxes
- People in different places and multiple social networks
- Society becomes increasingly connected
- Still in little boxes, mostly still in fixed groups BUT do have networks
- How we live now
- Not based on location anymore
- Psychological neighborhoods: communities based on common interest
- Social networks disembedded from ‘place’
- Physical place less and less important
- But it still remains important as home and work places are the bases → place-
to-place connectivity
- Dominant mode of communication: fixed telephone, mail, fax and internet (by end of 20th
century → email)
- The bike really changed the way how people could organize themselves
- You could reach next village, your world got bigger
- Scared of losing social cohesion because of it
- Now we also have the electrical scooter (Go/Check/Felyx) & Uber
- Glocalized = between global and local
- Easier to become member of other networks (global)
- But still main way to organize themselves is still in little boxes (local)
- This is how people prefer to live and how we live right now
3. Networked individualism (21st century, emerging)
- We will lose the little boxes and we become more individuals in a network
- Person-to-person connectivity
- More individually based, not across boxes
- Rapid switching between networks
4
