Enterprise 2.0: the new organisational democracy?

Organisations have increasingly turned to new technologies to facilitate discussion, aid decision-making, increase participation and engagement, and to share information and views. Recently, collaborative web-based technologies, known as Enterprise2.0 or social media, have been deployed into the workplace, and some organisations have moved beyond simple experimentation. Considered an extension as the consumer-led Web2.0 phenomena, Enterprise2.0 placed great emphasis on social interaction, ease of use and network effects. Whilst practitioners have actively discussed the issues associated with Enterprise2.0, little academic work has explored the use of these technologies to aid participation and engagement or enquired into how Enterprise2.0 is experienced by those in the organisation. This study took an interpretivist case study approach to investigate a rare and revelatory example of large scale organisational adoption of Enterprise2.0, and used the academic lens of organisational democracy, and the associated fields of organisational politics and power to help explain the case. Three embedded units of analysis were considered, each of which had varying levels of both employee engagement and Enterprise2.0 adoption. The study sought to understand to what degree the technology allowed more conversation between leaders and workers, and considered the experience of the different actors within the organisation regarding the drivers, uses, benefits or barriers they perceived. The study found that the use of technology resulted in a largely one-way conversation, that both leaders and workers politicised the interventions, and used power and control to restrict or inhibit discussion and debate. The findings suggested the interventions shared parallels with studies into organisational democracy, and were affected by similar contextual factors. These aspects are described, and the study proposes a model for overcoming the tensions that were found to exist, calling upon wider literature to explain the underlying mechanisms that might be at play, and resulting in a proposed agenda for future research.