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The chapter presents a senior management view on the role of new and technologically advanced tools, such as social media in internal communications.

We conducted 23 in-depth interviews with senior managers of large- and medium-sized companies in Slovenia.

The results obtained in the research confirmed that the senior management possess a strong awareness of the importance of internal communications in managing their organizations. Moreover, many top managers even pointed out that internal communications play a crucial role, and add value to the business performance through more motivated employees and that social media in the context of internal communications are vivid and growing in importance.

The study provides a starting point for further research in this area. However, the core policy recommendation would mainly be focused on internal communication experts, who must no longer underestimate the urgency of developing communication programs that help employees and senior management start working with social media successfully.

The research presents a new — senior management view on the role of social media in internal communications.

The aim of this chapter is to frame the key issues in workplace information literacy. This chapter is the personal experiences and observations of the author with over 30 years of experience in intranets, corporate libraries and product development. The workplace is not a single or uniform population, as can be said broadly about mass markets like consumers, K-12 students, or undergraduate scholars. Workplaces are defined as the workers in both not-for-profit and for-profit sectors who are tasked with running the organization and delivering services to end users like learners, customers, clients, patients, etc. This chapter explores these issues and frameworks through key target audiences in commercial and institutional workplace environments such as:

• Teachers (as opposed to students)

• Faculty (professors as opposed to young scholars)

• Corporate administrators and business decision-makers, executive, professionals, consultants, accountants, auditors, MBAs, managers

• Medical professionals such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists

• Lawyers (in both private practice and internal corporate and government work)

• Engineers

• Creative professions (artists, advertisers, marketers, etc.)

Teachers (as opposed to students)

Faculty (professors as opposed to young scholars)

Corporate administrators and business decision-makers, executive, professionals, consultants, accountants, auditors, MBAs, managers

Medical professionals such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists

Lawyers (in both private practice and internal corporate and government work)

Engineers

Creative professions (artists, advertisers, marketers, etc.)

This chapter presents a study on the role of internal communication for diversity and inclusion (D&I) management in organisations. It sheds light on how the units D&I management and internal communication are linked to each other in terms of exchanging and sharing ideas and know-how and the (common) pursuit and achievement of strategically set objectives. In total, 20 D&I experts (17 D&I managers and three D&I management consultants) from Austria and Germany were interviewed. The focus of the interviews was on the development of D&I management strategies and concomitant measures as well as the internal D&I communication activities. The findings indicate the importance of internal communication to communicate D&I goals and measures. In this context, the internal communication department plays the role of a service provider and advisor. Numerous communication channels are used to communicate D&I initiatives, with ‘rich’ media such as interpersonal communication and social intranet being particularly common. Furthermore, the results show that storytelling is a particularly popular form of communication. The study contributes to the scholarly examination of the role of internal communication in D&I management, to what extent and how the two units collaborate, and what communication measures are taken to pursue D&I management goals.

This chapter examines the use of social media within organizations in order to engage with both current and potential future employees.

It is commonly claimed that social media technologies can help organizations to engage with both current and potential employees. This chapter examines these claims through an examination of the use of social media within two organizations: a UK television company and an international UK telecommunications company. Data was gathered from the company websites and via 34 semi-structured interviews.

The two case studies confirm that social media has promise with regard to facilitating the engagement of existing employees. However, the findings suggest also that the use of social media to engage employees will not be successful unless the culture and leadership of the organization already embraces open communication and participation.

The findings are limited in that they rely on two case studies and therefore might not be applicable to other organizations. Despite the limitations, this chapter has significant implications for organizations considering the adoption of social media as a means to improve employee engagement. It suggests that when adopting social media for organizations, the very first step should be to assess the organizational readiness with a focus on culture and people rather than on the technology itself. This is because managerial behaviors and styles are central to the level of engagement individuals feel with an organization. For the same reason leaders need to be trained to lead collaboratively, and to be able to understand the new social practices.

The chapter makes an important contribution to an extremely sparse literature on social media as a means for engaging with employees through the provision of rare empirical data and is therefore valuable both for managers and for HR scholars and practitioners.

This chapter offers insights on how knowledge management (KM) tools and initiatives contribute to successful internal branding. Knowledge management has gained considerable recognition from both business practitioners and academics. However, understanding and implementation of KM practices in relation to internal branding is still a largely unexplored field. The authors, thus, present several models of knowledge sharing and outline their applicability to the field of internal branding. Through a case study of a Finnish multinational company Teleste, this chapter shows the applicability of the presented theories for brand knowledge sharing. The practical case looks at how knowledge sharing helped Teleste in the process of rebranding, particularly when promoting its new brand image within the organization.

Organizational fields are shaped by both the relations that organizations forge and the language they express. The structure and discourse of organizational fields have been studied before, but seldom in combination. We offer a methodological approach that integrates relations and expressions into a comprehensive visualization.

By mapping networks and discourse as co-constitutive, the method illuminates the mechanisms active in organizational fields. We utilize social impact evaluation as an issue field shaped by the presence of an interstitial community, and compare this structure with simulated alternative field configurations.

The simulations reveal that variation in organizations’ openness to adopting concepts from adjacent meaning systems alters field configurations: differentiation manifests under conditions of low overall openness, whereas moderate receptivity produces hybridizations of discourses and sometimes the emergence of an interstitial community that bridges domains. If certain organizations are open while others remain focused on their original discourse, then we observe integration in the discursive domain of the invariant organizations.

The observations from the simulations are represented by visualizing organizational fields as topographies of meaning, onto which interorganizational relations are layered. This representation localizes organizations and their interactions in a cultural space while emphasizing how meanings of relationships and organizational expressions vary with different field configurations. By adding meaning to network data, the resulting maps open new perspectives for institutional research on the adaptation, translation, and diffusion of concepts.

This study explores interactions on internal social media (ISM) in a Danish bank in order to understand how communicative leadership is enacted in social media dialogues within an organizational context. Three months of posts, comments and likes from September to November 2018 were analyzed to identify communicative leadership roles and communicative leadership behaviours. Three types of communicative leadership arose in this study: formal communicative leadership, coconstructed communicative leadership and peer communicative leadership. Communicative leadership was further identified in communicative acts such as setting directions, making sense, solving problems and listening. The findings suggest that communicative leadership is coconstructed in interactions between managers and employees as well as in interactions among employees. In this respect, communicative leadership on ISM is not only enacted by formal managers but aslo by knowledgeable individual organizational members and it is also coconstructed by groups of employees. In this respect, the findings help us understand leadership as a complex set of interactions in organizational contexts and know that empowering communication on ISM can therefore enhance employee engagement.

David Ellis is Professor in the Department of Information Studies at Aberystwyth University. He was previously lecturer and senior lecturer in the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield. He has a PhD and an MA in Information Studies from the University of Sheffield, and a BA in Philosophy and Politics from the University of Durham. His PhD study of the information behaviour of academic social scientists represented one of the first attempts to apply a rigorous qualitative methodology to modelling the information seeking patterns of social science researchers and was subsequently extended to studies of scientists in both academic and industrial research environments. These interests were further developed in the course of the uncertainty in information seeking project carried out in collaboration with researchers at the University of Sheffield and the University of North Texas. Professor Ellis has published extensively in the information studies field, his work has been recognised as representing a distinct, substantive and methodological contribution to the fields of information behaviour and information retrieval research, and is widely cited in both. His current research interests are in the areas of information behaviour, information and knowledge management and information systems. Professor Ellis's professional activities have included service on the UK Research Assessment Exercise, Peer Review Panel for Library and Information Management, and Research Convenor of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review Panel for Librarianship, Information and Museum Studies. He is a member of the AHRC and the Economics and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC) Peer Review Colleges and Research Notes Editor of the International Journal of Information Management.