The Go-Betweens: Backstage Collaboration Among Community Managers in an Inter-organisational Enterprise Social Network

Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) have made inroads into many workplaces demonstrating their usefulness for enabling collaboration, information sharing and new forms of knowledge work. Yet, at the same time many organisations have fallen short of reaping such benefits since ESN, as malleable technologies, require a form of bottom-up sense-making for appropriate use cases and work practices to form and emerge. This runs counter to established, usually top-down implementation techniques. As a result, a new role has been established in many organisations to look after ESN implementation, that of the community manager. As a middle management role, community managers face challenges of mediating between management expectations and worker wants and needs, in addition to looking after the emerging ESN community. In this paper we study an inter-organisational ESN platform that offers a place for community managers from different organisations to engage in collaborative work to come to grips with their role and devise strategies for successful ESN adoption and use in their respective organisations. By employing Ervin Goffman’s theatre lens, we come to understand this ESN as a backstage channel that allows community managers to ‘share secrets’ and foster ‘collegiality’ as a way to cope with the demands of their role. We provide practical implications for stakeholders involved in malleable technology implementation and outline future research directions.