Enterprise social networks: A literature review and research agenda

Abstract

Enterprise Social Networks (ESNs) have been receiving increasingly more attention in academia and practice over the past years. ESNs are implemented to improve collaboration among employees and to foster knowledge management by capturing tacit knowledge, among other reasons. However, ESNs do not always fulfill the companies’ expectations and consequently companies question their investment. Due to the growing popularity of ESNs in practice and the still unanswered questions of how to ultimately achieve ESN success, a growing number of researchers have started to analyze the ESN phenomenon, leading to a steadily growing number of publications in a variety of outlets. However, research groups are not in accordance yet on what terminology to use for the given phenomenon. This shows that the young research field of ESNs is still in development. To support future research and practice, we perform a literature review to answer three research questions: first, we analyze which terms for the phenomenon of ESNs were used and which term tends to be accepted by the community recently. Second, we analyze ESN publications regarding the addressed topics to provide a state-of-the-art in regard to ESN research. We elaborate a framework using the dimensions ESN implementation status and focus of investigation to structure the publications and to provide a comprehensive overview of the research topics. Third, we identify areas of future research on the basis of the current publications and trending topics.