In the age of the smart machine: the future of work and power
In the age of the smart machine: the future of work and power
IT and changing professional identity: micro-studies and macro-theory
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
A set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies in information systems
MIS Quarterly - Special issue on intensive research in information systems
Electronic Trading and Work Transformation in the London Insurance Market
Information Systems Research
Generalizing Generalizability in Information Systems Research
Information Systems Research
Blogging as social activity, or, would you let 900 million people read your diary?
CSCW '04 Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Communications of the ACM - The Blogosphere
How blogging software reshapes the online community
Communications of the ACM - The Blogosphere
Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
Enacting Integrated Information Technology: A Human Agency Perspective
Organization Science
Information and Organization
Organizing Visions for Information Technology and the Information Systems Executive Response
Journal of Management Information Systems
Exploring the Corporate Blogosphere: A Taxonomy for Research and Practice
HICSS '08 Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter
HICSS '10 Proceedings of the 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Information Systems Research
Community learning in information technology innovation
MIS Quarterly
Information and Organization
Blog, Blogger, and the Firm: Can Negative Employee Posts Lead to Positive Outcomes?
Information Systems Research
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This paper examines how a new actor category may emerge in a field of discourse through the new media of the Internet. Existing literatures on professional and organizational identity have shown the importance of identity claims and of the tensions surrounding "optimal distinctiveness" for new actors in a field, but have not examined the roles of new media in these processes. The literature on information technology (IT) and identity has highlighted the identity-challenging and identity-enhancing aspects of new IT use for existing actor categories but has not examined the dynamics associated with the emergence of new actor categories. Here, we investigate how a new actor category may emerge through the use of new media as a dynamic interaction of discursive practices, identity claims, and new media use. Drawing on findings from a case study of technology bloggers, we identified discursive practices through which a group of technology bloggers enacted claims of a distinctive identity in the joint construction of their discourse and in response to continuous developments in new media. Emergence of this new category was characterized by ongoing, opposing yet coexisting tendencies toward coalescence, fragmentation, and dispersion. Socio-technical dynamics underlying bloggers' use of new media and the actions of prominent ("A-list") bloggers contributed to these tendencies. We untangle theoretically the identity-enabling and identity-unsettling effects of new media and conceptualize the emergence of a new actor category through new media as an ongoing process in which the category identity may remain fluid, rather than progress to an endpoint.