Jeffrey Treem

• University of Texas at Austin

Multiple facets of the current social and technical environment challenge traditional orientations toward understanding both expertise and experts. Digital and informated workplaces produce contexts that necessitate workers enact process expertise, expertise that is applicable to managing information and communication both within and across domains...

Metrics are increasingly used by organizations to communicate and evaluate how employees’ actions align with organizational goals. In practice, metrics provide a mechanism for making some work visible, but in doing so can create a paradox whereby it is more difficult to understand what behaviors are contributing to outcomes. This study focused on t...

Workplaces are increasingly full of complex technologies embedded in dynamic infrastructures demanding workers to assess and understand unanticipated problems. In order to comprehensively appraise the role of technological complexity and the uncertainties it affords in a complex, high-stakes setting, we interviewed and observed members of three int...

Organizations are increasingly adopting social technology platforms in an effort to support increased knowledge sharing among workers. Although scholarship has indicated that the use of social technologies can increase multiple forms of communication visibility within organizations, little is known about the nature of these relationships and how th...

Agency describes a set of assumptions held by social theorists about the source and story of social reality. Those assumptions matter to computer-mediated communication (CMC) theorizing because they answer for researchers where the (real) action is and who is capable of acting. Assumptions regarding agency direct researchers’ attention, often unint...

This work conceptualizes enterprise social media (ESM) as a multifunctional public good that both supports communication that connects users directly and allows users to contribute or access communal information. We show how differing motivations to use an ESM—connective or communal goals—interact with individuals’ perceptions of activity on a plat...

The future of work will be measured. The increasing and widespread adoption of analytics, the use of digital inputs and outputs to inform organizational decision making, makes the communication of data central to organizing. This article applies and extends signaling theory to provide a framework for the study of analytics as communication. We repo...

This study investigates the longitudinal relationship between after‐hour connectivity, autonomy and exhaustion. In doing so, we seek to illuminate the role of individuals' connectivity to work in relation to their autonomy and well‐being. We juxtapose different effective directions of the relationship between connectivity and autonomy to shed light...

This study examines the longitudinal relationship between two affordances of organizational information and communication technologies (ICTs)—that is, visibility and persistence—and individuals’ subjective stress and technology-assisted supplemental work (TASW). We propose that visibility and persistence associated with organizational ICTs are ofte...

Purpose The benefits associated with visibility in organizations depend on employees' willingness to engage with technologies that utilize visible communication and make communication visible to others. Without the participation of workers, enterprise social media have limited value. This study develops a framework to assess what deters and drives...

Social media technologies have the potential to be helpful and harmful to employees. We seek to move beyond this broad dichotomy by providing a concise review of current research on the relationship between social media use in organizational contexts and employee well-being. Our review comprises 51 articles which are grouped by theoretical focus: p...

This study investigates the relationships between the use of various organizational ICTs, communication visibility, and perceived proximity to distant colleagues. In addition, this study examines the interplay between visibility and proximity, to determine whether visibility improves proximity, or vice versa. These relationships are tested in a glo...

Prior research on expert collaborations has focused on how specialists – experts with deep domain knowledge – work across disciplinary boundaries with other specialists, with much less attention paid to how generalists – experts with broader and connective knowledge – work alongside specialists. To address this gap, we examined collaborative work r...

Supported by various collaboration technologies that allow communication from any place or time, employees increasingly engage in technology‐assisted supplemental work (TASW). Challenges associated with managing work and non‐work time have been further complicated by a global pandemic that has altered traditional work patterns and locations. To dat...

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...

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 act...

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...

This study aims to develop a better understanding of the potential drivers of personal social media use for work and the work-related information employees share through these platforms. This is important given both the increased use of social media as a form of self-presentation and the potential organizational consequences of workers' online know...

This study investigates how individuals working in the innovation field communicatively define the nature of their work and make assessments of others’ innovative ability. Drawing on signaling theory, this work explores what communicative signals are valued within an ambiguous professional context. Interviews with 36 innovation workers revealed tha...

Introduction This study explored the effects of integrating community members into the evaluation of clinical and translational science grants. Methods The University of California, Irvine Institute for Clinical and Translational Sciences (ICTS) engaged 21 community reviewers alongside scientific reviewers in a 2-stage process of evaluating resear...

Over the past three decades, scholars have increasingly come to view knowledge as one of the most important resources necessary for successful organization in the contemporary socioeconomic landscape. In our vigor to understand how organizations may harness the diverse knowledge available to them, however, we have produced a disparity in our theori...

Analytics is heralded as an important, new and increasingly widespread organizational function, and one that promises new approaches for generating value from organizational knowledge. What is not yet clear is how analytics may affect how organizations work with data, or how organizations can realize the benefits of analytics. Analytics, envisioned...

Changes in contemporary organizations and work environments suggest reconsideration of how expertise is constituted in organizations. Specifically, a communicative view of expertise is advanced that views expertise in organizations as the product of communicative signals that are associated with an actor, and attributed as expertise by an observer....

Previous research has demonstrated the critical role communication plays in a group’s ability to recognize its expert members. This study looks broadly at the different forms of communication that might influence expertise recognition and considers how structural, relational, and communicative factors are related to individuals’ success in having t...

Research on expertise examines ways that actors identify, assess, and utilize exclusive knowledge and abilities. Organizations value expertise both as a resource that can provide a competitive advantage, and as a practice that informs decision making and problem solving. It is through communication that expertise is expressed and evaluated, and the...

Grounded theory is both a philosophical approach and methodology for data analysis that is focused on the discovery and development of theory through direct engagement with data. As such, grounded theory is almost exclusively an inductive orientation to research whereby a researcher considers all data present, and sorts those data into meaningful s...

The concept of affordances has been increasingly applied to the study of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in organizational contexts. However, almost no research operationalizes affordances, limiting comparisons and programmatic research. This article briefly reviews conceptualizations and possibilities of affordances in general an...

This study considers fitness-tracking applications as settings for communicative performances. Qualitative interviews and observations with 41 users of a cycling-focused fitness application revealed communicative themes of qualifying, social sharing, and withholding. Users also assessed other members through social-group comparing and upward compar...

This study aims to clarify inconsistencies regarding the term affordances by examining how affordances terminology is used in empirical research on communication and technology. Through an analysis of 82 communication-oriented scholarly works on affordances, we identify 3 inconsistencies regarding the use of this term. First, much research describe...

Social media continues to grow as a focus of social, organizational, and scholarly interest, yet there is little agreement as to what constitutes social media and how it can be effectively analyzed. We review various definitions of social media and note that much of the confusion regarding social media comes from conflation between social media typ...

Although research has explored employees’ organizational identification, few scholars have investigated liminal workers’ identification. This gap is problematic because nonmembers represent organizations and their attachments may influence their work. To understand this poorly understood phenomenon, we conducted interviews with agency social media...

This work examines how knowledge-intensive firms that lack strong ties to professional groups, or exclusive jurisdiction in a technical domain, communicate organizational expertise. A practice-based view of organizational expertise is used to examine how workers accomplish expertise through recurrent practices, and the processes through which that...

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 r...

Although extensive theory and research has explored employees’ organizational identification, scholars have paid little attention to people with liminal relationships who might identify with organizations. This gap in the literature is problematic because non- members often represent organizations and may need to feel a sense of attachment to accom...

This study extends recent work exploring the affordances of social media in organizations by considering how social media may also operate as technologies of accountability. This perspective adopts a performative view of social media use in organizations and recognizes that the technologies not only display communication to organizational members b...

This study explores the relationship between the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and assessments of workers' knowledge and abilities in 2 knowledge-intensive organizations. Drawing on expectation states theory, the article argues that a worker's communication through mundane, widely diffused ICTs may lead to status assessme...

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 largel...

Researchers in many disciplines treat expertise as an individually held attribute that allows for consistently superior performance in a specific domain. However, in knowledge-intensive environments, where work practices are ill-defined, invisible, and their outputs are ambiguous, attributions of expertise are not likely to emerge solely from objec...

This article explores why it is often difficult for organizations to capture, store, and share employees’ individually held expertise. Drawing on studies of the social construction of expertise and theories of transactive memory systems and self-presentation in computer-mediated environments, we argue that knowledge management technologies should b...

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 la...

This study is the first large-scale multi-method attempt to empirically examine the characteristics leading to development of expertise in EverQuest II, a popular massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMOs). Benefiting from the unprecedented opportunity of obtaining game log data matched with survey data, the project investigated the rel...

Mentoring refers to the phenomenon where a more skilled or knowledgeable person helps a less skilled or less knowledgeable person gain skill in a particular domain. In this paper we study the phenomenon of mentoring in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). We identify four different types of mentoring, which map to several import...

What is a blog? While this may seem like a basic question, it is the subject of dispute among researchers, and hardly settled among users of the medium. We return to this fundamental inquiry by asking 89 blog reading college students how they conceptualize the term and what purpose blogs serve for them. Our findings suggest that perceptions of blog...

Distributed work arrangements are gaining in popularity across all manner of organizations. But managers are still often worried that the “teleworkers” who opt for them will be too perceptually distant from the office to work effectively. To remedy this problem, managers often insist that teleworkers adopt Information and Communications Technologie...

We examine the social behaviors of game experts in Everquest II, a popular massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMO). We rely on Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGM) to examine the anonymous privacy-protected social networks of 1,457 players over a five-day period. We find that those who achieve the most in the game send and receive more...

The current application of transactive memory theory to the use of knowledge management systems takes expertise as a central and relatively stable concept. However, expertise is a socially defined and contextually dependent construct. The present study examines how knowledge management tools can facilitate negotiations of expertise by displaying kn...

This study examines how online content consumers evaluate the credibility of the media they read on the Internet. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are used to explore whether individuals evaluate identical content differently based upon the media type that displays the news. Survey results indicate that individuals rated news appearing on...