Social strategies for information technology adoption: Social regulation process of mandated enterprise social network systems

In knowledge-intensive organizations, such as IT companies or consultancy firms, knowledge and knowledge sharing constitute key resources for competing in a dynamic business environment. To enable knowledge sharing, large, diversified organizations increasingly introduce Enterprise Social Network Systems (ESNSs) to connect employees and teams working in geographically distributed units. Although previously the literature on the introduction of IT tools primarily focused on functional objectives, many questions remain regarding the influence of power dynamics on the ESNSs adoption process. Through the lenses of institutional and social regulation theories, this paper aims to better understand the interactions between the organization that mandates the use of ESNSs and the actors expected to adopt it. Our results point to three types of strategies the different actors implement to align their own practices with the logics the new social networking tool introduces, namely: 1) the parallel use strategy, 2) the overuse strategy, 3) and the tolerant strategy