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How the Structures Provided by Social Media Enable Collaborative Outcomes: A Study of Service Co-creation in Nonprofits

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Abstract

This paper explains how social media drives organization-public collaborative outcomes such as social media-enabled service co-creation in non-profit organizations (nonprofits). We assume a technology affordances perspective to identify social media structures enacted through discovering functional affordances, managing constraints through privacy preferences, and constructing meaning and values, We explain how these structures relate to service co-creation. We surveyed 73 nonprofits on social media and collected 289 usable responses. We apply structural equation modeling to analyze the data. Our findings suggest that symbolic constructed meaning and values together with the organization’s privacy preferences on social media are positively related to socialization, visibility, and information sharing affordances. Unlike information sharing, socialization and visibility affordances are, in turn, positively related to service co-creation. This study advances our theoretical understanding of how social technology structures produce collaborative outcomes and offers practical insights into the cumulative value of social media.

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Acknowledgements

The International Research Scholarship (IRS) and UTS President’s Scholarship awarded to the author by University of Technology Sydney, Graduate Research School, enabled this work. We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers who dedicated their time and offered highly insightful observations and comments that have significantly improved the quality of this paper.

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  1. University of Technology Sydney, FEIT, 81 Broadway, Ultimo, 2007, NSW, Australia

    Fatuma Namisango, Kyeong Kang & Ghassan Beydoun

  2. Makerere University Business School, Plot 21A Old Port Bell Road Nakawa, Kampala, Uganda

    Fatuma Namisango

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Namisango, F., Kang, K. & Beydoun, G. How the Structures Provided by Social Media Enable Collaborative Outcomes: A Study of Service Co-creation in Nonprofits. Inf Syst Front 24, 517–535 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-020-10090-9

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