Paul M Leonardi
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 936496 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Paul M Leonardi |
| NOMBRES | Paul M |
| APELLIDO | Leonardi |
| FIRMA | LEONARDI P M |
| AFILIACIONES | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0929-8731 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 37 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 202 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 36 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2008 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Homo agenticus in the age of agentic AI
How Remote Work Changes the World of Work
Remote work is typically characterized as work that is done at some physical distance from the office. Existing research has shown that the main elements of this characterization—physical distance and the office—are far more complex than most people realize. This review develops a framework that refracts the concept of remote work into four types of distance—psychological, temporal, technological, and structural—and three objects from which one c…
Building relational confidence in remote and hybrid work arrangements
Remote and hybrid workers know fewer of their colleagues and have fewer strong workplace relationships. If strong relationships support knowledge sharing, workers will have a harder time getting knowledge they need. Prior research shows that digital communication technologies increase workers’ network-level knowledge of “who knows what” and “who knows who.” Yet, knowledge seekers may be hesitant to ask for knowledge, particularly when they have c…
Keep Them Apart or Join Them Together? How Identification Processes Shape Orientations to Network Brokerage
This article investigates how the targets with which brokers identify shape the orientation with which they approach their network position. Brokers are often thought of as exhibiting a tertius gaudens orientation toward their network position through their efforts to keep disconnected groups apart, thereby maintaining their ability to control the flow of information between the groups. However, brokers may also exhibit a tertius iungens orientat…
Artificial Intelligence and Impression Management
Artificially intelligent communication technologies (AICTs) that operate autonomously with high degrees of conversational fluency can make communication decisions on behalf of their principal users and communicate with those principals’ audiences on their behalf. In this study, we explore how the involvement of AICTs in communication activities shapes how principals engage in impression management and how their communication partners form impress…
Wrestling with Digital Objects and Technologies in Studies of Work
Studying technical work at digital interfaces, especially the work of engineers, poses challenges for ethnographers. In addition to the difficulties of understanding and documenting what engineers do at their computers, engineers use concepts and vocabularies that are foreign to social scientists without technical training. The authors describe the methods they developed over a decade to deal with these and related issues in their ethnographies o…
Experts at Coordination
This paper argues that coordination among domain experts can be viewed as a distinct form of knowledge in itself, and an area in which an individual may become an expert. We discuss why domain experts may be ill-equipped to coordinate their knowledge with the knowledge of others, and why individuals with process expertise may be better equipped to facilitate coordination between domain experts. Drawing on a qualitative study of nurses organizing …
Behavioral Visibility
The digitization, digitalization, and datafication of work and communication, coupled with social and technical infrastructures that enable connectivity, are making it increasingly easy for the behaviors of people, collectives, and technological devices to see and be seen. Such digital connectivity gives rise to the important phenomenon of behavioral visibility. We argue that studying the antecedents, processes, and consequences of behavioral vis…
Resourcing expertise
This research draws on a resourcing perspective to challenge the assumption that expertise should be conceptualized as an asset with consistent value for organizations, and offers an alternative view that expertise is enacted through communicative processes that create resources-in-use. Analysis of the introduction of an offshoring center offering potential expert work in a global automotive company revealed that the meaning of this potential res…
Translating national discourse into teaching and learning outcomes
We analyze information and communication technology in education initiatives in two South American countries: Bolivia and Uruguay. Utilizing qualitative data collection and analysis methods, we construct a comparative case study to trace the path of how national discourses—in response to the idea of globalization and initiatives promoting computers in education—were translated into policy goals, strategic implementation plans, and teaching and le…
Computer-Mediated Communication in the Age of Communication Visibility
This article argues that a distinctive aspect of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is the way it can make communication visible to others in ways that were previously impractical. We propose a theory of communication visibility that recognizes its multidimensional nature: resulting from activities that make communication visible, efforts by actors to see communication, and a sociomaterial context that influences possibilities for visibility. …
Breaking into Collaboration
Inter-organizational collaborations (IOCs) offer opportunities for organizations to share resources and address complex social problems. Although researchers have cast IOCs as a broadly-inclusive process in which organizations decide to join forces through mutual agreements, many IOCs are not equal partnerships, but are led by a single organization or a tight collection of organizations that have already been convened. This paper explores how new…
Social Media and Their Affordances for Organizing
Social media—computer-mediated tools of the Web 2.0 generation that make it possible for anyone to create, circulate, share, and exchange information in a variety of formats and with multiple communities—have become increasingly widespread in today’s organizations. Social media have started to affect multiple organizational phenomena and processes. This article pursues three interrelated goals. First, it provides a theoretical framework, based up…
Ambient Awareness and Knowledge Acquisition
The argument proffered in this paper is that use of enterprise social networking technologies can increase the accuracy of people’s metaknowledge (knowledge of “who knows what” and “who knows whom”) at work. The results of a quasi-natural field experiment in which only one of two matched-sample groups within a large financial services firm was given access to the enterprise social networking technology for six months revealed that by making peopl…
Bringing Technological Frames to Work
This study examines the expectations that workers have regarding enterprise social media (ESM). Using interviews with 58 employees at an organization implementing an ESM platform, we compare workers' views of the technology with those of existing workplace communication technologies and publicly available social media. We find individuals' frames regarding expectations and assumptions of social media are established through activities outside wor…
Studying Work Practices in Organizations
A recent practice turn in the communication and organizational sciences has led many researchers to study work in practice. In this chapter I suggest that studies of work practices in organizations would benefit from conceptual clarification. To do so, I organize this review around three central questions: (a) what are work practices? (b) what role do work practices play in the process of organizing? and (c) how can scholars build theory from emp…
Social Media as Social Lubricant
Knowledge stickiness often impedes knowledge transfer. When knowledge is complex and the knowledge seeker lacks intimacy with the knowledge source, knowledge sticks in its point of origin because the knowledge seeker faces ambiguity about the best way to acquire the needed knowledge. We theorize that, given the extent of that ambiguity, knowledge seekers will make a choice to either ask for needed knowledge immediately after deciding it is needed…
Social Media, Knowledge Sharing, and Innovation
This paper offers a theory of communication visibility based on a field study of the implementation of a new enterprise social networking site in a large financial services organization. The emerging theory suggests that once invisible communication occurring between others in the organization becomes visible for third parties, those third parties could improve their metaknowledge (i.e., knowledge of who knows what and who knows whom). Communicat…
When Does Technology Use Enable Network Change in organizations? A comparative Study of Feature Use and Shared Affordances1
The goal of this study is to augment explanations of how newly implemented technologies enable network change within organizations with an understanding of when such change is likely to happen. Drawing on the emerging literature on technology affordances, the paper suggests that informal network change within interdependent organizational groups is unlikely to occur until users converge on a shared appropriation of the new technology’s features s…
Materiality and Organizing
Ask a person on the street whether new technologies bring about important social change and you are likely to hear a resounding yes. But the answer is less definitive amongst academics who study technology and social practice. Scholarly writing has been heavily influenced by the ideology of technological determinism - the belief that some types or technologically driven social changes are inevitable and cannot be stopped. Rather than argue for or…
Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality
Social Media Use in Organizations
The use of social media technologies—such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, social tagging, and microblogging—is proliferating at an incredible pace. One area of increasing adoption is organizational settings where managers hope that these new technologies will help improve important organizational processes. However, scholarship has largely failed to explain if and how uses of social media in organizations differ from existing forms of c…
Enterprise Social Media
Social media are increasingly implemented in work organizations as tools for communication among employees. It is important that we develop an understanding of how they enable and constrain the communicative activities through which work is accomplished because it is these very dynamics that constitute and perpetuate organizations. We begin by offering a definition of enterprise social media and providing a rough historical account of the various…
Digital Age| The Management of Visibilities in the Digital Age — Introduction
What we see, what we show and how we look are fundamental organizational concerns made ever more salient by the affordances, dynamics, and discourses of the digital age. Contemporary organizing practices are awash with material, mediated and managed visibilities: companies erect glass buildings with open and networked office spaces to efficiently share information, respond to stakeholder demands by crafting extensive transparency policies, and or…
The Management of Visibilities in the Digital Age
What we see, what we show and how we look are fundamental organizational concerns made ever more salient by the affordances, dynamics, and discourses of the digital age. Contemporary organizing practices are awash with material, mediated and managed visibilities: companies erect glass buildings with open and networked office spaces to efficiently share information, respond to stakeholder demands by crafting extensive transparency policies, and or…
Social Media Use in Organizations
The use of social media technologies—such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, social tagging, and microblogging—is proliferating at an incredible pace. One area of increasing adoption is organizational settings where managers hope that these new technologies will help improve important organizational processes. However, scholarship has largely failed to explain if and how uses of social media in organizations differ from existing forms of c…
Computer-Mediated Communication in the Age of Communication Visibility
This article argues that a distinctive aspect of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is the way it can make communication visible to others in ways that were previously impractical. We propose a theory of communication visibility that recognizes its multidimensional nature: resulting from activities that make communication visible, efforts by actors to see communication, and a sociomaterial context that influences possibilities for visibility. …
Enterprise Social Media
Social media are increasingly implemented in work organizations as tools for communication among employees. It is important that we develop an understanding of how they enable and constrain the communicative activities through which work is accomplished because it is these very dynamics that constitute and perpetuate organizations. We begin by offering a definition of enterprise social media and providing a rough historical account of the various…
Engineering Objects for Collaboration
Prior research suggests that boundary objects gain meaning through group interaction. Drawing from the literature on strategic ambiguity, we explore the possibility that individuals strategically create potential boundary objects in an attempt to shape the meanings that groups develop. From ethnographic observations of automotive engineers, we identify 2 creation strategies: ambiguity (to create objects that support multiple meanings) and clarity…
Crossing the Implementation Line
A growing number of studies suggest that technological change and organizational change must be closely linked at the microsocial level of analysis. However, most extant research has explicitly linked technological change to activities surrounding a technology's development and organizational change to activities surrounding a technology's use. This article suggests that when researchers view technological and organizational change as discontinuo…
From Road to Lab to Math
Today, in the midst of economic crisis, senior executives at US automakers and influential industry analysts frequently reflect on the progression that safety testing has taken from the crude trials done on the road, to controlled laboratory experiments, and to today’s complex math-based simulation models. They use stories of this seemingly linear and natural sequence to justify further investment in simulation technologies. The analysis presente…
Occupational Stereotypes, Perceived Status Differences, and Intercultural Communication in Global Organizations
This paper offers a novel perspective on why individuals in global organizations make culturally based attributions of their colleagues that impede effective working relations. Drawing on observational and interview data from an ethnographic study of product development work at a global automaker's engineering centers in Mexico, the United States, and India, we show the important role that occupational stereotypes and perceived status differentia…
Social Issue Emergence on the Web
In this paper, we unravel the complex ontological relationship between the empirical hyperlink networks enacted by strategic organizational actors and the epistemic issue networks enacted by decision makers who navigate hyperlinks to construct the boundaries of an issue. To conceptualize this relationship, we present a dual structurational model of issue network emergence that demonstrates the processes by which decision makers come to read and s…
Communication and Materiality
The Communication Monographs Café first opened six months ago when it hosted a group of scholars to talk about issues social justice and public scholarship. The conversation was wide-ranging and stimulating, so we knew it was important to open the Café on a regular basis for more interaction about the issues that are engaging today’s communication researchers. This time, we opened the Café during the summer months*iced drinks were the norm, and t…
Why Do People Reject New Technologies and Stymie Organizational Changes of Which They Are in Favor? Exploring Misalignments Between Social Interactions and Materiality
This paper explores the relationship between users' interpretations of a new technology and failure of organizational change. I suggest that people form interpretations of a new technology not only based on their conversations with others, but also through their use of technology's material features directly. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of ethnographic data on the implementation and use of a computer simulation technology at a m…
Social Media as Social Lubricant
Knowledge stickiness often impedes knowledge transfer. When knowledge is complex and the knowledge seeker lacks intimacy with the knowledge source, knowledge sticks in its point of origin because the knowledge seeker faces ambiguity about the best way to acquire the needed knowledge. We theorize that, given the extent of that ambiguity, knowledge seekers will make a choice to either ask for needed knowledge immediately after deciding it is needed…
Homo agenticus in the age of agentic AI
Building relational confidence in remote and hybrid work arrangements
Remote and hybrid workers know fewer of their colleagues and have fewer strong workplace relationships. If strong relationships support knowledge sharing, workers will have a harder time getting knowledge they need. Prior research shows that digital communication technologies increase workers’ network-level knowledge of “who knows what” and “who knows who.” Yet, knowledge seekers may be hesitant to ask for knowledge, particularly when they have c…
Studying Work Practices in Organizations
A recent practice turn in the communication and organizational sciences has led many researchers to study work in practice. In this chapter I suggest that studies of work practices in organizations would benefit from conceptual clarification. To do so, I organize this review around three central questions: (a) what are work practices? (b) what role do work practices play in the process of organizing? and (c) how can scholars build theory from emp…
Materiality and change
Crossing the Implementation Line
A growing number of studies suggest that technological change and organizational change must be closely linked at the microsocial level of analysis. However, most extant research has explicitly linked technological change to activities surrounding a technology's development and organizational change to activities surrounding a technology's use. This article suggests that when researchers view technological and organizational change as discontinuo…
From Road to Lab to Math
Today, in the midst of economic crisis, senior executives at US automakers and influential industry analysts frequently reflect on the progression that safety testing has taken from the crude trials done on the road, to controlled laboratory experiments, and to today’s complex math-based simulation models. They use stories of this seemingly linear and natural sequence to justify further investment in simulation technologies. The analysis presente…
Technological Grounding
In technologically grounded organizations, culture is bound tightly to the material characteristics of the technology that the organization manufactures, distributes, or services. Technological grounding helps explain why high-technology organizations often experience cultural integration problems following a merger. Examining the recent merger of US West and Qwest, this article analyzes how powerful actors strategically used the process of techn…
Why Do People Reject New Technologies and Stymie Organizational Changes of Which They Are in Favor? Exploring Misalignments Between Social Interactions and Materiality
This paper explores the relationship between users' interpretations of a new technology and failure of organizational change. I suggest that people form interpretations of a new technology not only based on their conversations with others, but also through their use of technology's material features directly. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis of ethnographic data on the implementation and use of a computer simulation technology at a m…
What’s Under Construction Here? Social Action, Materiality, and Power in Constructivist Studies of Technology and Organizing
Over the past two decades, organizational scholars have increasingly argued that technology’s affects on organizations are socially constructed. Constructivists who study implementation generally hold that organizational change emerges from an ongoing stream of social action in which people respond to a technology’s constraints and affordances, as well as to each other. Although most students of technology and organizing generally agree on the on…
Digital materiality? How artifacts without matter, matter
It sounds rather odd to say that digital artifacts -- like software -- have material properties because people generally think of materials or materiality as physical substances such as wood, steel, and stone. Yet scholars increasingly talk about the "materiality" of digital artifacts. What do they mean? In this paper, I explore two definitions of the adjective "material" -- practical instantiation and significance -- in addition to its normal co…
Communication and Materiality
The Communication Monographs Café first opened six months ago when it hosted a group of scholars to talk about issues social justice and public scholarship. The conversation was wide-ranging and stimulating, so we knew it was important to open the Café on a regular basis for more interaction about the issues that are engaging today’s communication researchers. This time, we opened the Café during the summer months*iced drinks were the norm, and t…
Materiality, Sociomateriality, and Socio-Technical Systems
This chapter reviews the history of three terms increasingly used by researchers in the fields of organization studies and information systems: “materiality,” “sociomateriality,” and “socio-technical systems.” After this review, the chapter explores ways in which these terms overlap and depart in meaning from one another in scholars' writings. The chapter suggests that materiality might be viewed as a concept that refers to properties of a techno…
Social Issue Emergence on the Web
In this paper, we unravel the complex ontological relationship between the empirical hyperlink networks enacted by strategic organizational actors and the epistemic issue networks enacted by decision makers who navigate hyperlinks to construct the boundaries of an issue. To conceptualize this relationship, we present a dual structurational model of issue network emergence that demonstrates the processes by which decision makers come to read and s…
Engineering Objects for Collaboration
Prior research suggests that boundary objects gain meaning through group interaction. Drawing from the literature on strategic ambiguity, we explore the possibility that individuals strategically create potential boundary objects in an attempt to shape the meanings that groups develop. From ethnographic observations of automotive engineers, we identify 2 creation strategies: ambiguity (to create objects that support multiple meanings) and clarity…
When Does Technology Use Enable Network Change in organizations? A comparative Study of Feature Use and Shared Affordances1
The goal of this study is to augment explanations of how newly implemented technologies enable network change within organizations with an understanding of when such change is likely to happen. Drawing on the emerging literature on technology affordances, the paper suggests that informal network change within interdependent organizational groups is unlikely to occur until users converge on a shared appropriation of the new technology’s features s…
Materiality and Organizing
Ask a person on the street whether new technologies bring about important social change and you are likely to hear a resounding yes. But the answer is less definitive amongst academics who study technology and social practice. Scholarly writing has been heavily influenced by the ideology of technological determinism - the belief that some types or technologically driven social changes are inevitable and cannot be stopped. Rather than argue for or…
Theoretical foundations for the study of sociomateriality
Social Media Use in Organizations
The use of social media technologies—such as blogs, wikis, social networking sites, social tagging, and microblogging—is proliferating at an incredible pace. One area of increasing adoption is organizational settings where managers hope that these new technologies will help improve important organizational processes. However, scholarship has largely failed to explain if and how uses of social media in organizations differ from existing forms of c…
Enterprise Social Media
Social media are increasingly implemented in work organizations as tools for communication among employees. It is important that we develop an understanding of how they enable and constrain the communicative activities through which work is accomplished because it is these very dynamics that constitute and perpetuate organizations. We begin by offering a definition of enterprise social media and providing a rough historical account of the various…
Occupational Stereotypes, Perceived Status Differences, and Intercultural Communication in Global Organizations
This paper offers a novel perspective on why individuals in global organizations make culturally based attributions of their colleagues that impede effective working relations. Drawing on observational and interview data from an ethnographic study of product development work at a global automaker's engineering centers in Mexico, the United States, and India, we show the important role that occupational stereotypes and perceived status differentia…
Social Media, Knowledge Sharing, and Innovation
This paper offers a theory of communication visibility based on a field study of the implementation of a new enterprise social networking site in a large financial services organization. The emerging theory suggests that once invisible communication occurring between others in the organization becomes visible for third parties, those third parties could improve their metaknowledge (i.e., knowledge of who knows what and who knows whom). Communicat…
Ambient Awareness and Knowledge Acquisition
The argument proffered in this paper is that use of enterprise social networking technologies can increase the accuracy of people’s metaknowledge (knowledge of “who knows what” and “who knows whom”) at work. The results of a quasi-natural field experiment in which only one of two matched-sample groups within a large financial services firm was given access to the enterprise social networking technology for six months revealed that by making peopl…
Bringing Technological Frames to Work
This study examines the expectations that workers have regarding enterprise social media (ESM). Using interviews with 58 employees at an organization implementing an ESM platform, we compare workers' views of the technology with those of existing workplace communication technologies and publicly available social media. We find individuals' frames regarding expectations and assumptions of social media are established through activities outside wor…
Studying Work Practices in Organizations
A recent practice turn in the communication and organizational sciences has led many researchers to study work in practice. In this chapter I suggest that studies of work practices in organizations would benefit from conceptual clarification. To do so, I organize this review around three central questions: (a) what are work practices? (b) what role do work practices play in the process of organizing? and (c) how can scholars build theory from emp…
Social Media as Social Lubricant
Knowledge stickiness often impedes knowledge transfer. When knowledge is complex and the knowledge seeker lacks intimacy with the knowledge source, knowledge sticks in its point of origin because the knowledge seeker faces ambiguity about the best way to acquire the needed knowledge. We theorize that, given the extent of that ambiguity, knowledge seekers will make a choice to either ask for needed knowledge immediately after deciding it is needed…
Social Media and Their Affordances for Organizing
Social media—computer-mediated tools of the Web 2.0 generation that make it possible for anyone to create, circulate, share, and exchange information in a variety of formats and with multiple communities—have become increasingly widespread in today’s organizations. Social media have started to affect multiple organizational phenomena and processes. This article pursues three interrelated goals. First, it provides a theoretical framework, based up…
Breaking into Collaboration
Inter-organizational collaborations (IOCs) offer opportunities for organizations to share resources and address complex social problems. Although researchers have cast IOCs as a broadly-inclusive process in which organizations decide to join forces through mutual agreements, many IOCs are not equal partnerships, but are led by a single organization or a tight collection of organizations that have already been convened. This paper explores how new…
Translating national discourse into teaching and learning outcomes
We analyze information and communication technology in education initiatives in two South American countries: Bolivia and Uruguay. Utilizing qualitative data collection and analysis methods, we construct a comparative case study to trace the path of how national discourses—in response to the idea of globalization and initiatives promoting computers in education—were translated into policy goals, strategic implementation plans, and teaching and le…
Computer Science (27 obras) · Sociology (23 obras) · Political science (21 obras) · Knowledge management (16 obras) · Business (15 obras) · Information Systems Theories and Implementation (15 obras) · Psychology (11 obras) · Public relations (11 obras) · Epistemology (10 obras) · Management and Organizational Studies (10 obras)