Lost in Translation? A Social Media Characterization of Organization Development

Abstract

Social media is increasingly becoming a dominant venue for communicating and exchanging knowledge in several academic disciplines. One question of recent interest is to what extent characterizations of a discipline on social media hold true to its traditional characterizations. Are they congruent or incongruent? Are they sufficiently broad or insufficiently narrow? In this study we set out to examine the characterization of OD, particularly its construal in the Twitter domain, a prominent social media platform, and how similar or dissimilar this construal is compared to more traditional characterizations of OD. An analysis of over 5.7 million tweets scraped from Twitter during the period May 1, 2018 to June 26, 2018 indicates that the Twitter based construal of OD shares very limited characteristics with traditional characterizations of OD drawn from both contemporary and historical OD literature. It extends the call for a broader cadre of OD scholars and practitioners to participate in research and practice in the arena of social media both as a novel platform and as a way of enriching OD’s characterization and prominence in this knowledge forum.