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Social Media as a New Workspace: How Working Out Loud (Re)Materializes Work

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New Ways of Working

Part of the book series: Technology, Work and Globalization ((TWG))

Abstract

Social media platforms are more than virtual spaces for banal interactions or personal content sharing. In this chapter, we present empirical examples of ‘working out loud’ (WOL) practices, in which individuals voluntarily turn to mainstream social media platforms (such as Instagram and Twitter) to share what is part of their daily work. We highlight five dimensions that render visible traditional elements of work and workspaces including (1) the work, (2) the worker, (3) the work process, (4) the experience of work and (5) the work context. We propose that it is through those WOL practices that work materializes and that social media are more than simple tools used by workers but rather constitute new workspaces where work and workers are constituted and performed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As the material we have collected could not be included in this chapter for copyright reasons, we provide this example which was published on Instagram by the first author.

  2. 2.

    We should note that this separation in five categories is more analytical than empirical. Indeed, posts like the examples we are presenting here offer the possibility of combining several of these dimensions.

  3. 3.

    See also Dale (2005) and Orlikowski (2007) for the entanglement of the social and the material in “sociomateriality”, and Vásquez and Cooren (2013, p. 25) for “space as sociomaterial interrelations”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Montreal, QC, Canada

    Claudine Bonneau & Viviane Sergi

  2. Bern University of Applied Sciences, Bern, Switzerland

    Nada Endrissat

Authors
  1. Claudine Bonneau
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  2. Nada Endrissat
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  3. Viviane Sergi
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Correspondence to Claudine Bonneau .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Muenster University, Muenster, Germany

    Nathalie Mitev

  2. Paris Dauphine University, Paris, France

    Nathalie Mitev

  3. Durham University, Durham, UK

    Jeremy Aroles

  4. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Kathleen A. Stephenson

  5. ESSEC Business School, Cergy, France

    Julien Malaurent

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Bonneau, C., Endrissat, N., Sergi, V. (2021). Social Media as a New Workspace: How Working Out Loud (Re)Materializes Work. In: Mitev, N., Aroles, J., Stephenson, K.A., Malaurent, J. (eds) New Ways of Working. Technology, Work and Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61687-8_3

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