Twittering on digital HRM: Social media communication as a form of institutional work

The digital human resource management (HRM) has attracted considerable attention from practitioners and mass media channels alike, but we still lack an understanding of what kind of institution it will become in the end and more specifically, what kind of tactics individual and organizational actors adopt in building the new institution. By identifying a discursive space of 472 actors around digital HRM on a social media platform, Twitter, we find three different types of institutional work in which these actors are involved whilst working to create an institution of digital HRM: advocating, educating, and virtual networking. In addition, we elaborate the specific strategies used by these groups of actors when building the digital HRM institution and illustrate that promoters of digital HRM tap into multiple types of institutional work selectively and pick and mix them thus employing a broader than usual discursive strategy. Overall, our study contributes by illustrating how social media communication expands the traditional institutional work by crossing the physical, local, and geographical boundaries of a discursive space as well as bridging the physical and local boundaries with the virtual ones thereby allowing the actors to reach a wider HR community which, in turn, collectively and in turn shapes the emerging institution of digital HRM.