'It’s my passion and how I am now': Shapingemployee social identity through a self-organised Facebook page
Abstract
The study makes a further contribution to attempts to explore and theorisehow and why there is an increasing trend of employees taking to social networking sites in order to cope withorganisational injustices.A range of technologies were used to interviewUSA retail employee users of a self-organised Facebook page, including interviews conducted via telephone, messenger, email and Skype. The findings point towards employees being driven to such forums because of the negative effects of organisational injustices ontheiremployee social identity. The findings also suggest Facebook forums can shape social identity and in turn cope better with organisational injustices. Employee identification with Facebook self-organised groups has wider implications, however, in that both employers and organised labour need to recognise that employee social identitiesincreasingly reflect such widespread, every-day activities.
Introduction
The fracturing of the labour movement over the past three decades has led to a plethora of scholarly interest in the self-organising activities of employees denied traditional sources of collective power. Early examples of such research include employee defiance in a nightclub environment (Analoui and Kakabadse, 1989), informal opposition usingmasculine-natured humour (Collinson, 1988), resistance and misbehaviour under Just-in-Time and Total Quality Management regimes (Delbridge, 1995), andmanagement-led sabotage as a response to reduced job control (LaNuez and Jermier, 1994).
Around the turn of the millennium,, however, attention of this kind began to shifttowards employee self-organising activityunder rapidly emerging electronic control technologies, such as those associated with call centres. Studies of this kind (e.g. Bain and Taylor, 2000; Townsend, 2005) were, as such, instrumental in critiquing the alleged potency of new labour processes(Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995).
In more recent times interest has shifted once again to employee self-organising activities facilitated by the rapid growth of social networking sites (SNSs), or ‘new new technologies’ (Howcroft and Taylor, 2014). Studies of this kind focus on work blogs as forums for sharing critical accounts of employers (Schoneboom, 2007; 2011a; in press), conflict expression (Richards, 2008), reflecting on employment matters and seeking advice from others (Ellis and Richards, 2009), and enabling employees to resurrect and galvanise a sense of control and attachment to their own occupational or professional community (Richards and Kosmala, 2013). Crucially, further studies, however, also notethat newer and rapidly expanding SNSs, such as, Facebook and Twitter, have largely superseded blogs as the most common and active forums for Internet-based employee self-organising activities (Schoneboom, 2011b; Richards, 2012).
Despite the growing interest in employee self-organising activities conducted via SNSs, it is evident that work of this kind is limited in various ways. The limitations are most notable in terms of how the extant literature focuses on a particular declining forum for on-line employee self-organisation. This wave of blog-related research, moreover, is centred largely on activities in the UK at the expense of studies conducted in other distinct social, economic and political settings. Further, such research is also typically informed by labour process analysis, an approach strong on theorising structural triggers for resistance and misbehaviour, yet limited in terms of theorising the more nuanced aspects of such activities (Haslam, 2001).Therefore, key aims of the paper are to further theorise why employees are driven to SNSs and how SNSs help employees cope with perceptions of organisational injustice, such as, low pay, inadequate voice mechanisms and job insecurity, with such aims explored in relation to employee social identity.In doing so the current research makes an important contribution to our understandings of why employees are increasingly taking to SNSs when faced with organisational injustices.
In order to achieve such aims, the paper is structured as follows. First, there is a two-part review of relevant literature, focusing on the growing prevalence of employee self-organisation activities and SNSs, as well as a discussion oftheories related to organisational justice, social identity and coping. In the second section the research design, methodology and case details are described and discussed. The third section concerns the presentation and analysis of the main findings from the study. The final and concluding section is an overall discussion of the study, including a consideration of the wider significance and implications of the study findings.
The context for the rise of employee self-organisation throughSNSs
It has been widely noted that the nature of work and employment has changed in many ways over the past few decades and will no doubt continue to change in the years to come.Central to such changes is said to be an increased emphasis on productivity, efficiency and control due to the pressures of globalisation and competition (Kickul, 2001; Nauset al., 2007), with emphasis on performance leading to fundamental changes in employee-organisation relations (Shore et al., 2004). Employee-organisation relations formerly based on loyalty, trust and commitment in exchange for job security, training and support are said to have been replaced by employee-organisation relationscharacterised by longer hours, flexibility, and relentless change (Naus et al., 2007). A second key change of late includes significant downward pressures on the least paid in society. For instance, in the USA 58 per cent of the 44.5 million people who receive government supported ‘food stamps’ (from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) were working in the month of receipt (Rosenbaum, 2013). Further, in a quest to become 'lean and mean' (Naus et al., 2007) more organisations are making use of temporary workers and looking to “abrogate the employment relationship that they have established with their employees” (Kickul, 2001, p. 289). As such, while organisations are better equipping themselves to combat the external business environment, a by-product of such endeavours is the creation of a wide-range of organisational injustices.
As the nature of employment has changed it also follows that the means by which employees cope with such changes are likely to change too. Since traditional outlets for employee organisation and opposition, such as via trade unions, collective bargaining and strikesremain a bastion of an increasingly small minority of the USA workforce (OECD, 2014), it is evident that the Internet, particularly in the form of SNSs, offers some degree of potential for prototype trade unionism to emerge (Edelman and Intelliseek, 2005). At the very least, SNSs have, for example, created the potential for non-unionised employees to move from largely individual to socially organised forms of workplace misbehaviour (Richards, 2012). Indeed, it has been argued by USA law scholars that employee use of SNSs should be allowed similar degrees of legal protection afforded to trade unions, such as, freedom of expression and association (Gely and Bierman, 2006; Coté, 2007). Such views have been given prominence with theUSA National Labor Relations Board’s ruling in favour of a worker who was dismissed for starting a conversation on Facebook with colleagues criticising her manager (Armour, 2011).
An assessment of the capabilities of Facebook as a tool for employee self-organisation should begin, however, with a consideration of the incredible rise to prominence of this means of communication in less than 10 years. For instance, in 2007 to 2008 Facebook had approximately 50 million active users worldwide (BBC News, 2012). Current figures suggestFacebook has in the region of 1.28 billion active usersworldwide (Facebook, 2014), with one in three of all USA citizens (130 million) using Facebook each day (Saba, 2013). In relation to employment, research suggests employees haveon average 16 work colleagues as ‘friends’ (Schawbel, 2012). Unlike early Internet users who were typically consumers of static web-pages (Murugesan, 2009), SNSsallow users to post thoughts and feelings at the touch of a button to the Internet, thus creating a ‘social web’. Many view this as largely involving people communicating unremarkable events to the Internet (Keen, 2007), yet the‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 broughtto worldwide prominence the important role that SNSs can play in informing, connecting and mobilising the disparate to resist dominant forces (Mansour, 2012).
It follows, therefore, ifSNSs can be harnessed by previously unorganised political protesters, SNSs should also offer employees increased self-organising capabilities (Richards, 2012). Indeed, it has been demonstrated that early SNSs, such as blogs, provide accessible and self-governable opportunities for employees to connect with one another and create on-line communities based on mutual and self-defined interests(Richards, 2008; Ellis and Richards, 2009). Key to such trends, however, is that for millions of contemporary employees, both employmentandInternet use are integral to their existence, with boundaries between employment and personal, ‘real’ and ‘online’ lives, becoming increasingly blurred (Kozinets, 2010).
Organisational justice, social identity and coping
This section brings together a body of literature that creates an opportunity to ask how SNSs shape social identity. The discussion encompasses theories related to organisational justice, social identity and coping behaviour.
Organisational justice theory
It was earlier established that employees turn to SNSs because of perceived injustices of some kind. Therefore, theories surrounding organisational (in)justice, particularly related to how employees ascribe notions of justice to whether they are being treated fairly or ‘justly’ in the workplace (Moorman, 1991), link in well employee behaviour and attitudes of such kind.
A key issue, as such, in relation to the employee-organisation relationship is subjective judgements about fairness (Coyle-Shapiro and Dhensa, 2011). It is said thereare four facets to conceptualising an employee sense of justice, that of fairness of outcomes, procedures, interpersonal treatment and explanations (Colquitt et al., 2001). A further issuerelated to fairness of outcomes is of distributive justice. This refers to situationswhere the employee judges whether or not there is a balance between what he/she receives from the organisation in relation to what he/sheputs into the organisation (Coyle-Shapiro and Dhensa, 2011). Further angles include procedural justice, where employees judge whether the way that outcomes are achieved is in keeping with principles of process fairness (Leventhal, 1980); interactional justice, where employees make judgements about the quality of the treatment they receive from their employer; and, interpersonal justice, concerning the respectfulness and propriety of treatment (Coyle-Shapiro and Dhensa, 2011).
Linked to the procedural facet of justice is the concept of ‘voice’. Folger (1977) defines voice as an opportunity to participate in decision-making by having an opinion and found that voice positively contributes to perceptions of procedural fairness. Key to this study is the notion of employee desire to have a say about what goes on in their organisation, yet at the same time judging formal organisational outlets for such sentiments to be missing, inadequate, misused or even subject to corruptive forces. Also of importance to the current study is that being excluded in some way from organisational decision-making deprives employees feelings of inclusion, respect and standing (Ceylan and Sulu, 2010), even where there is little eventual influence over outcomes (Tyleret al., 1996).
Responses to perceptions of injustice,however, often involverestorativeorretributive strategies (Coyle-Shapiro and Dhensa, 2011). According to work blog research and wider, recent labour process research, internal opportunities to restore justice appear rare, with retaliatory behaviour more likely. Where employees have restricted access to redistributive strategies, many organisational behavioural theorists suggest this can lead to incidents of workplace misbehaviour, yet such acts are often driven by a lack of self-esteem brought about by an inability of the employee to restore an injustice (Ferris et al., 2012).
The impact of organisational injustice on social identity
If it is taken that an employee's work is an important source of social identity (Caza and Wilson, 2009), then denying an employee important aspects of work is likely to have some effect on the employee's social identity. In this instance social identity refersto the perception that individuals have of ‘who they are’ based on the knowledge that they belong to a group and the “value and emotional significance” associated with that group (Tajfel, 1982, p. 255). A three-factor model of social identity comprises how often individuals think about the group as well as how important being part of the group is to their self-definition (centrality), the specific emotions associated with group membership (in-group affect), and, the extent to which individuals feel part of or tied to the group (in-group ties) (Cameron, 2004).
Group value and relational models of justice (Lind and Tyler, 1988) serve to explain why perceptions of organisational injustice, in particular procedural and interpersonal injustice, have a profound impact on employees’ social identity. Tyler et al. (1996) found that unfair procedures and interpersonal treatment relay identity relevant information in two ways. Firstly, interpersonal injustice signals that someone occupies a marginal position within the group since they are not ‘good enough’ to be treated respectfully. This in turn has an effect on the employee's perception of membership and sense of belonging to that group. Secondly, as manifestations of the norms and values of the group, unfair procedures and treatment signal the extent to which someone can feel pride in membership. As such, if the norms and values of the group are to act unfairly (in most cases) it would be difficult to derive pride from that membership. Thus injustice impacts people’s consideration of their position within the group (respect) as well as the position of the group (pride). Consequently, a lack of respect and pride will cause their social identity to “collapse” (Caza and Wilson, 2009, p. 135) since they no longer feel they belong to the group or can evaluate it positively.
In sum, organisational justice motivates a desire to identify with a group (Gaston and Harrison, 2012) by engendering feelings of worthiness (via care and respect) and a sense of belonging and emotional significance (pride), whereas organisational injustice will motivate a desire to dis-identify with a group. This is because individuals are motivated to maintain a positive social identity (Delelis and Desombre, 2005) and seek group membership that satisfies the need to belong as well as one that has emotional significance and warrants pride. These are expected to be salient issues in attempts by employees to self-organise via SNSs.
The coping qualities of social networking
Self-organising via SNSs may well involve an attempt to collectively change an employer strategy, yet is perhaps even more apparent that activities of this kind are in the first instance primarily about coming to terms with or coping with organisational injustices.In other words, the view taken here is that SNSs offer an outlet for individuals who face organisational demands that exceed their individual resources (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984). This study, however, focuses on two forms of coping identified by Dunkel-Schetteret al. (1987), that of problem and emotion focused coping. The research methods outlined in the next section are expected, as such, to provide the tools to gain insights into how SNSs can facilitatesocial support and opportunity for emotional expression. In more detail, SNSsare expected to provide a basis for searching for similar others (Delelis and Desombre, 2005), as well as have a positive effect on self-esteem and life satisfaction (Cameron, 2004) and mutual care and social support (Baumeister and Leary, 1995).
There are, however, further key issues to comprehend in relation to coping and SNSs. Firstly, the coming together of individual senses of organisational injustice can lead to instrumental aid, where action from others can help an individual perform their duties; socio emotional aid, taking the form of demonstrations of love and care; informational aid, where advice, feedback and information is given that could improve an individual’s circumstances (Turner, 1983). Secondly, SNSs are likely to provide opportunities for what is referred to as collective self-esteem, or wherebelonging to a group brings value and emotional significance (Crocker and Luhtanen, 1990). Thirdly, SNSs are likely to enhance employee coping qualities because employees can create meaning fromthe everyday stressful events they face (Park and Folkman, 1997). However, it may be the case that the first stages of creating meaning will largely involve feelings of anger and manifest as an emotional explosion (Cohen, 2007), with previous research on work blogging indicating how venting (Richards, 2008) can give way to more positive reflections of negative situations (Richards and Kosmala, 2013). Moreover, previous research also suggests SNSs can create a sense of belonging (Schoneboom, 2007; Ellis and Richards, 2009). Facebook, as such, is expected to provide a further, yet new and uniqueopportunity to address identity deficits acquired through employment.
Research design and methodology
The realities of researching employee social networking activities
In an ideal situation exploring the self-organising activities of employees conducted via SNSslends itself well to the emergent and multi-method approach of netnography (Kozinets, 2010). However, extant research suggests pragmatism andsingle methods are both realistic and efficient approaches to researching the social networking activities of employees. For instance, previous research points towards semi-structured interviews,largely conducted via telephone or a range of non-face-to-face e-communication methods (Schoneboom, 2007, in press; Ellis and Richards, 2009; Richards and Kosmala, 2013), self-reporting e-questionnaires (Richards, 2008) and secondary sources sourced over time via monitoring Internet media stories (Richards, 2012). What is apparent here is the reality of conducting research with individuals who may be thousands of miles away from the researcher, participants spread over vast geographical areas, isbased on communicative technologies of both a synchronous and asynchronous nature,as well as surrounding activities that are difficult to follow without consuming vast quantities of time and effort. A further apparent issue here is that of the researcher or researchers acquiring 'insider status' as part of developing trust with informants. As such, small samples are currently typical of research related to employee use of SNSs.
The current study: The case of RetailCo