Responding to the (almost) unknown: Social representations and corporate policies of social media

End-user driven technologies, such as social media, have dramatically changed organizations’ innovation processes. In these new contexts, organizational decision makers have to contend with a de facto adoption of new technologies that they have yet to understand fully. In order to contribute to the understanding of these new contexts and their implications for organizations and their decision makers, this paper examines the following question: How do organizations come to comprehend and react to end-user driven technologies? Conceptually based on social representations theory, this paper underscores how organizational decision-makers develop common sense knowledge of end-user driven technologies and how they consequently endorse responses in the form of dedicated policies that reflect this knowledge. This theoretical framework helps us interpret the empirical analysis of 25 corporate social media policies. The paper shows that, in developing their understanding of social media, so far organizational decision-makers have mostly associated them with what was already familiar to them and have devised policies that have reflected this mostly conservative understanding of the new technologies. Implications of this research include a better understanding of the foundation of the duality between mindful and mindless innovations in the context.