Social Media as Technologies of Accountability: Explaining Resistance to Implementation Within Organizations

This study extends recent work exploring the affordances of social media in organizations by considering how social media may also operate as technologies of accountability. This perspective adopts a performative view of social media use in organizations and recognizes that the technologies not only display communication to organizational members but also, in doing so, potentially increase the accountability of workers. Using a case study of the implementation of a social media system inside a financial services company, this work explores how workers view social media in terms of various forms of accountability. The findings reveal that prior to implementation of the social media system workers expressed concern about the accountability social media would create, and that the reluctance to face the accountability associated with communications led to low use of the social media system.