Call for Papers

Digital platforms have ushered in a new era of connectivity, redefining how actors communicate and engage with the world (Bennett, 2003; Castells, 2000), making the exploration of social and environmental issues online crucial for organizational scholars.
 
Sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok have become important arenas for public discourse and the construction of collective cultural and social values (Milmo, 2022; Hsu et al., 2021; Goldenberg & Gross, 2020). Indeed, social media have reshaped how individuals, organizations, and social movements conduct stakeholder interactions (Bennett et al., 2008; Castelló & Lopez-Berzosa, 2023; Shokouhyar et al., 2023). These spaces can become vibrant forums and facilitate innovative ways to address grand challenges (Ferraro et al., 2015; George et al., 2016), as they allow for novel approaches and practices that promote environmental sustainability, social welfare, justice, and progress for all.
 
However, alongside these potentially positive contributions, social media channels also harbour risks. They have become conduits for spreading fake news and conspiracy theories (Knight & Tsoukas, 2019; Halford, 2023). Additionally, they serve as a breeding ground for new ‘wicked problems’ (Reinecke & Ansari, 2016; Rittel & Webber, 1973), such as cyberbullying, misinformation, and harmful content that amplify negativity and divisive ideologies (Trittin-Ulbrich et al., 2021; Whelan et al., 2013). Artificial intelligence compounds these challenges, adding complexity to social media debates by introducing new tools that, while innovative, often provoke fear, confusion, misunderstanding, and polarization (Scherer et al., 2023; Bail et al., 2018).
 
These extremes highlight the need to examine the interplay between public discourse, social media, and organizing to develop a nuanced understanding of the role of the digital in constructing and destructing our social realities. With this as the guiding objective for this sub-theme, we would like to draw on different approaches and theoretical frameworks that we compile in three modes:

1. Process mode scrutinizes the dynamics of interactions between the different actors or actorhood participating in social media and the mechanisms involved in creating the engagements on environmental, social and governance challenges. For example, scholars studying social-symbolic work (Lawrence & Phillips, 2019; Harracá et al., 2023), emotion work (Toubiana & Zietsma, 2017), or emotion-symbolic work (Barberá-Tomás et al., 2019) highlight how social media dynamics (Cooper & Lauriano, 2022) can influence or even reshape the institutional norms, standards, and social evaluations that act as foundations for discourse. Furthermore, social media introduces new dimensions of time (Ancona et al., 2001), as its affordances (Leonardi & Vaast, 2017) can facilitate creativity and lead to change in discourse more rapidly (Wang et al., 2021). This can also link to different forms of framing (Reinecke & Ansari, 2016; Gray et al., 2015), as events can generate tensions between past, present, and future narratives surrounding social and environmental matters adding fresh perspectives to narrative analysis (Vaara & Whittington, 2012; Vaara et al., 2016).
2. Place mode emphasizes the virtual environments where interactions occur. Platforms are places of power (Zuboff, 2015; Harracá et al., 2023), where decisions are made about how people organize and discuss about for example issues of employment rights (Cutolo & Kenney, 2021). The characteristics of social media platforms have also been described as creating spaces where whistleblowers can report issues, employees can voice their complaints without revealing their identities, and stakeholders can scrutinize corporate practices such as greenwashing (Roulet & Touboul, 2015), bluewashing (de Faro Adamson & Andrew, 2007) and corporate hypocrisy (Lauriano et al., 2022; Wagner et al., 2009).
3. Community mode focuses on the digitally facilitated connection of users. Online communities can organize protests, boycotts, or social movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM) and #MeToo, or spread conspiracies, like QAnon or COVID vaccine skepticism (Abdalla Mikhaeil & Baskerville, 2024; Halford, 2023; McCarthy & Glozer, 2022). Beyond large-scale online communities, social media has also added additional layers to our existing relationships, such as those among employees (Lauriano et al., 2024; Lauriano, 2023) and between employees and their workplaces (Rothbard et al., 2022; Lauriano & Coacci, 2023). Furthermore, identity studies delve into the reciprocal relationship between individuals and groups on social media, exploring how users’ identities are both constructed and expressed through their online presence in relation to wider discourse (Scheuerman et al., 2018; Brandtzaeg & Chaparro-Domínguez, 2020).

We invite papers that address similar themes to the following broad research questions and puzzles:
 
Process mode:

• What are the antecedents, processes, and mechanisms underlying the collective construction of (organizational) social and environmental issues in social media?

• How is the discourse around (corporate) sustainability created, imagined, and innovated on social media?

• In what ways are engagements online different from offline manifestations of similar phenomena in the past?

• How do social media impact local and/or global efforts to address the grand challenges humanity faces?

 
Place mode:

• How do virtual platforms' design and features enable meaningful interactions and progressive discussions?

• How do virtual platforms influence transparency and accountability in corporate practices, including greenwashing, bluewashing, and exploiting social movements?

• How does disclosing information on virtual platforms affect whistleblowers' willingness to report issues versus traditional methods?

• How do private spaces on virtual platforms impact employee complaint expression, especially with anonymity?

• What ethical implications and challenges arise from using social media for reporting, complaint expression, and scrutinizing stakeholders?

 
Community mode:

• How do online interactions with stakeholders affect organizational aspects like culture, internal processes, and strategy?

• How do virtual platforms support more inclusive environments for marginalized voices (e.g., LGBTQ+, racial minorities, Global South) in organizations and public discourse?

• How do social media platforms contribute to spreading fake news, conspiracy theories, populism, and authoritarianism, or foster alternative epistemologies?

• What role do manipulation and engagement with social emotions, symbols, and cultural scripts play in shaping social realities or power dynamics, and how does this connect to polarization?

• How does social media discourse intersect with other institutional structures and power relations?

We advocate methodological and theoretical pluralism, welcoming both empirical and conceptual papers that use any qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods, and any theoretical or philosophical perspective, exploring diverse levels of analysis (e.g., individual, organizational, national).
 

References

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