The Quest for Legitimacy: Strategies for Tension Management in Organizational Social Media Use

Abstract

Despite the great utility of social media for improving organizational legitimacy, empirical evidence has revealed that organizations generally do a poor job adopting or using social media. Such seeming irrationality may be explored from a tension perspective, which posits that the dynamic interplay between the social construction of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and organizational tensions drives resistance to the adoption and use of ICTs. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 51 leaders of Chinese social ventures and two field experts, this research seeks to understand the dialectical tensions in social ventures’ social media use and how they manage such tensions. The findings highlight that social venture leaders perceive four key tensions: (1) entry vs. maintenance, (2) visibility vs. invisibility, (3) conforming vs. strategic legitimacy, and (4) emancipation vs. control. Moreover, I found two broad strategies Chinese social ventures employed to manage these tensions: (1) strategic hiddenness, and (2) networked, associative mechanism, which involves interorganizational and interpersonal relationship building with key actors. This research makes four theoretical contributions to research on organizational use of social media, organizational legitimacy, organizational tensions, and (social) entrepreneurship. Practical implications for social entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders are also drawn from the findings.