Platform drifting: When work digitalization hijacks its spirit

Organizations are increasingly digitalizing the work associated with information exchange by using enterprise social media. However, social media’s openness to outsider users poses significant challenges to maintaining alignment between social media logic (or platform logic that guides decisions and actions on the platform) and the dominant organizational logic. Through an in-depth, longitudinal, abductive study of three successive social media implementations in a single organization, I explore the process of maintaining (or losing) social media alignment and its long-term consequences on the nature of the work. The paper shows that digitalization exposes the work to continuous adjustment within and across three elements of digital work: digital infrastructure work (embracing new uses of the platform at the user level), digital strategy work (redesigning governance policies), and aligning work (fitting uses with the platform logic underlying digital work). The findings show that despite initial social media alignment, through continuous coevolution of these three elements, the platform logic underlying digital community work eventually drifted away from supporting the organization’s original logic of cohesion to supporting an alternative logic of inclusivity. Accordingly, a process model of platform drifting has been developed. By taking a closer look at actual practices, the paper contributes to digital work research by identifying distinct elements of digital work involved in social media (mis)alignment and illustrates the profound, long-term consequences of social media on the nature of the work.