DANCING WITH THE PARADOX — SOCIAL MEDIA IN INNOVATION THROUGH COMPLEXITY LENS

Abstract

This paper discusses the social media paradox in the context of innovation. Innovation is defined as a knowledge intensive process of seeing and doing things differently, whereas social media refers to new ways of being connected. Social media has revolutionised the ways how knowledge is produced, shared and accumulated through social interactions within the organisation and across the organisation's boundaries. From an organisational perspective, this raises the question of how social media influences — enabling or inhibiting — its ability to see and do things differently. Social media offers tempting opportunities but also poses new threats. It is a paradox involving contradictory forces. Despite growing interest among academics, there is a lack of understanding of the possibilities of social media in the specific context of innovation. This paper fills the research gap by arguing that complexity concepts offer a new type of language to understand social media. Seeing interaction as intrinsic to innovation activity, complexity thinking opens the paradox of being in charge but not in control.

Full text

DANCING WITH THE PARADOX —SOCIAL MEDIA
IN INNOVATION THROUGH COMPLEXITY LENS
HARRI JALONEN
Turku University of Applied Sciences
Lemmink€
aisenkatu 30, 20520 Turku, Finland
harri.jalonen@turkuamk.fi
Published 25 November 2014
This paper discusses the social media paradox in the context of innovation. Innovation is
defined as a knowledge intensive process of seeing and doing things differently, whereas
social media refers to new ways of being connected. Social media has revolutionised the
ways how knowledge is produced, shared and accumulated through social interactions
within the organisation and across the organisation’s boundaries. From an organisational
perspective, this raises the question of how social media influences —enabling or
inhibiting —its ability to see and do things differently. Social media offers tempting
opportunities but also poses new threats. It is a paradox involving contradictory forces.
Despite growing interest among academics, there is a lack of understanding of the pos-
sibilities of social media in the specific context of innovation. This paper fills the research
gap by arguing that complexity concepts offer a new type of language to understand social
media. Seeing interaction as intrinsic to innovation activity, complexity thinking opens the
paradox of being in charge but not in control.
Keywords: Innovation; social media; complexity theory; paradox.
Introduction
The claim is that social media results in novel ways of doing business based on
new kind of collaboration within and across organisations. As social media entails
rapid growth in the volume, velocity and variety of information, it is expected to
provide new possibilities for innovation too. Some enthusiasts are even witnessing
the advent of collaborative organisation in which employees, customers and other
stakeholders create spontaneously some kind of micro-scale innovation networks
which can be exploited for solving many resource problems (e.g., Morgan,2012).
A positive interpretation of social media draws on the thought that social media
International Journal of Innovation Management
Vol. 19, No. 1 (February 2015) 1550014 (26 pages)
© Imperial College Press
DOI: 10.1142/S1363919615500140
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has provided new possibilities for the internal use of external knowledge as well as
for the external exploitation of internal knowledge. Social media extends orga-
nisations because it has created new possibilities to engage with stakeholders both
internally and externally. It has been suggested that organisations can foster in-
novation through social media (Kohler et al.,2009;Jussila et al.,2012). Social
networking encourages people to share their knowledge and expertise (Ferreira
and du Plessis,2009;Vuori and Okkonen,2012), which may enhance collabo-
ration and innovation (Porta et al.,2008;Kohler et al.,2009;Standing and Kiniti,
2011). In this sense, social media resonates with the idea of open innovation
(Chesbrough,2003), which emphasises interactions between different actors as
fertile sources of innovation. However, the realisation of the innovation potential,
which social media provides, is not an easy task. Presumably social media is not a
panacea which by itself automatically translates information flows into new pro-
ducts and services. It means not only new possibilities but also new threats to
organisations’innovation processes.
A rather common view is that social media means less controllability and more
unpredictability (Bernoff and Li,2008). The more open and social organisations
are, the more vulnerable they become. It has been suggested that for organisations,
social media means a “lose control of their content and the reach, frequency and
timing of the distribution of their messages”(Mangold and Faulds,2009). Met-
aphorically social media punctures holes into organisations’walls making them
more transparent, which, in turn, increases for example the possibility of losing
confidential information. It seems that social media —as many other organisa-
tional artefacts (Cameron,1986)—involves a paradox, it is simultaneously both
a solution and problem. Contrary to situations involving dilemmas, dichotomies,
dualities and conflicts which all imply the reduction of contradictions into one or
two independent alternatives, the paradox refers to situations where there are no
need for choice to be made between contradictions (Cameron,1986). The paradox
accepts the simultaneous presence of opposing contradictions. When applied to
social media, the paradox arises, for example, from the fact that while social media
expands the information pool from which to draw decisions, it also simultaneously
generates contradictory information that makes it difficult to achieve consensus.
Depending on one’s perspective, social media involves potentiality to improve
knowledge productivity, or contrary, it may yield to the loss of productivity
if workers fall down to virtual hanging around. Although social media gives
organisations a powerful platform to harness their innovation potential, it also
complicates organisations’innovation processes. Social media promises novel
possibilities for organisations, though it is still a poorly understood phenomenon.
It has been argued that managers eschew or ignore social media, because they do
not understand the various forms it can take and how to engage with it (Kietzmann
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et al.,2011). Particularly lacking is the understanding of the possibilities of social
media in the specific context of innovation (Kärkkäinen et al.,2010).
This paper fills the research gap by exploring and discussing the paradox of
social media in organisations’innovation processes —its causes, symptoms and
possible remedies. Particularly, the paper addresses the paradox of managing
unpredictable behaviour. The paper asks: What does it mean to be in charge but
not in control of innovation process in the social media age?
Instead of associating the paradox with negative connotations, the paper
addresses the paradox as natural component of organisational activities. The aim is
to introduce a theoretically grounded interpretation for the paradox of social media
in innovation, whereby a more complete description and understanding of the
tensions are revealed (cf. Van de Ven and Poole,1988). In doing so, the paper also
touches on the discussion of productivity paradox of information technology
initiated by Solow (1987) and analysed and popularised thereafter by Brynjolfsson
(1993). Instead of arguing the productivity of social media per se, the paper draws
on the idea that organisations must accept and exploit rather than deny and ignore
paradoxes inherent in social media.
Methodologically, this paper uses theory driven conceptual approach, as the
aim is to analyse the paradoxes of social media in innovation through complexity
thinking. Complexity thinking is used as “the art of maintaining the tensions
between pretending we know something, and knowing we know nothing for sure”
(Richardson,2008). Complexity thinking refers herein to an amalgam of different
theories and approaches which emphasise the change from systemic to hetero-
geneous thinking and which are proven to be useful when studying the disorder–
order transitions. Complexity thinking was chosen as a theoretical lens for the
paper for five reasons: (1) social media and complexity thinking both are inclined
to acknowledge the central role of interaction in creating knowledge (Desai, 2010);
(2) complexity thinking is useful for understanding the emergence of new patterns
(i.e., innovation) through interactions in “local”level (Fonseca,2002); (3) com-
plexity thinking resonates with the idea of paradox accepting that the paradox
cannot be resolved, only endlessly transformed (Aasen,2009); (4) complexity
thinking allows exploring new approaches to innovation as it has not previously
been applied in the context of social media; (5) complexity has risen during the last
twenty years as one of the most potential approaches in organisational studies
(Oswick et al.,2011).
This paper is structured as follows. The second section provides conceptual
foundations. The third section discusses the dual nature of social media within
innovation. The fourth section presents complexity-based interpretation of coping
with the paradox of being charge but not in control. Finally, in the fifth sections
conclusions are drawn.
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Conceptual Foundation
Paradox —Mutually exclusive elements operating simultaneously
The existence of paradox has been a pervasive theme in the management litera-
ture, particularly in the field of organisational change (Cameron and Quinn,1988;
Eisenhardt,2000). Without exception paradoxes are seen as inseparable elements
of the management. Paradox is a situation in which “contradictory, mutually
exclusive elements are present and operate at the same time”(Cameron and
Quinn,1988). Conventional organisational paradoxes found in literature includes,
among others, knowledge exploration versus knowledge exploitation (March,
1991), explicit knowledge versus tacit knowledge (Nonaka and Takeuchi,1995),
single loop learning versus double loop learning (Argyris and Schön,1978),
cooperation versus competition (Lechner and Dowling,2003), control versus
autonomy (Starbuck,1992) formal versus emergent strategies (Stacey,1993),
openness versus closure (Kast and Rosenzweig,1985), strong versus weak ties
(Granovetter,1973). Paradoxes are tricky as there is no way to solve them. Par-
adox involves two poles which pull the things at hand to opposite directions.
Knowledge exploration, for example, is characterised as searching, risk taking,
playing, experimenting, discovering and innovating, whereas knowledge exploi-
tation is an organisational activity based on refinement, selection, implementation
and execution (March,1991). Exploration deals with unknown, while exploitation
address to known. Taken singly, both knowledge exploration and exploitation are
needed and “incontestably true”(cf. Van de Ven and Poole,1988), but taken
together they become inconsistent. The problem is as Van de Ven and Poole
(1988) have incisively pointed out that “if unacknowledged […] a paradox can
drive […] practitioners to emphasize one pole over the other in an attempt to
maintain an elusive consistency”.
As tricky as they are, however, the paradoxes can also be used for increasing
understanding of management challenges. Chae and Bloodgood (2006), for ex-
ample, have found that paradox forces focus on both poles of the paradox rather
than focusing on just one. In innovation context, for example, focusing on the
explicit knowledge without simultaneously considering tacit knowledge provides
an incomplete view of the potential use of the organisation’s knowledge resources.
This is because innovation process involves several knowledge problems varying
from lack of factual knowledge to lack of interpretative knowledge (Jalonen,
2013). During the innovation process, there are times when the focus should be on
effective exploitation of knowledge stored in information systems (McAdam,
2000), and then there are times when the problems at hand can be solved only by
deliberative discussions which draw on tacit knowledge including tactile experi-
ences, intuition and unarticulated mental models (Nonaka and von Krogh,2009).
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Without the acceptance of the co-existence and interdependence of two poles, the
risk is that the organisation is trying to maintain an elusive consistency (Van
de Ven and Poole,1988). Poles’influences on each other will be missed or ignored
if a paradoxical view was not used (Chae and Bloodgood,2006).
Van de Ven and Poole (1988) have presented four methods that can be used in
studying organisational paradoxes. The first method they have named as “to accept
the paradox and learn to live with it”, the second one as “to resolve paradoxes by
clarifying levels of reference and the connections among them”, the third one as
“to take the role of time into account”, and the fourth one as “to introduce new
terms or a new logic to paradox, whereby a more complete description and
understanding of the tensions are revealed”. According to Van de Ven and Poole
(1988), the first method serves as a kind of preliminary step to the other three.
Applying the theory-driven conceptual approach, this paper combines the first
and fourth method to explore and discuss social media paradoxes in innovation
context.
Innovation —Open and democratised and therefore complex process
Many studies have shown that an organisation’s ability to innovate is one of the
most important sources of competitive advantage. Innovation is typically heavily
laden with positive values and almost without doubt, innovations are considered
good not only for organisations but also for societies as a whole —a story tells
that with innovation comes progress. A positive interpretation of innovation traces
back to the work of Joseph Schumpeter (1911, 1942), who argued that seeing and
doing things differently —is a general driving force producing creative destruc-
tion. By creative destruction he, in turn, referred to an economic process in which
the old ways of doing things are endogenously destroyed and replaced by new
ways. In creative destruction the existing power derived from previous techno-
logical, organizational, regulatory and economic paradigms is replaced by new
forms engendered by innovation. Defining innovation as endogenous process has
significant practical and theoretical implications. From practical point of view, it
means that opportunities which originate, for example, from developments of
technology or changes in socio-economic environments are in the last resort de-
pendent upon the interpretations made by organisations themselves. Opportunities
are created and also exploited by the innovation process itself (cf. Sarasvathy and
Venkataraman, 2010). From theoretical point of view, it means that emphasis
should focus on the process by which organisations interpret various and often
contradictory information cues. Particularly, in the age of social media, a topical
question is what kind of sensemaking processes (Weick,1995) the external in-
formation may trigger within organisations.
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Innovation research has matured substantially since the days of Schumpeter.
From this paper’s perspective, three significant intellectual changes have hap-
pened within innovation research during the past decades. First, the modern
innovation literature claims that innovation takes place in open and co-opera-
tive settings between different stakeholders. One landmark of this change in
thinking was Henry Chesbrough’s book of open innovation (2003) which
gathered both researchers’and practitioners’attention to the inflows and out-
flows of knowledge to accelerate organisations’innovation. “Open innovation”
can be seen as a contrast to the traditional outlook in which research and
development operations lead to internally developed products distributed by the
same organisation. The basic idea is that the organisation’s external information
may be just as valuable as its internal information, and the organisation’s
internal information (particularly that which is unused) should be openly dis-
tributed outside the organisation.
Second, Eric von Hippel (2005) has argued that we are living in the middle of
change in which customers are transforming from consumers to (co)creators.
Hippel’s concept “democratizing innovation”is based on a rather simple but
revolutionary idea that users of products and services themselves know the best
how the products and services actually meet their needs and how products and
services should be improved. Moreover, the benefits of improving products and
services are not restricted just to the revampers themselves but spread wider. As
von Hippel has stated “individual users do not have to develop everything they
need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed and freely shared
by others”. Later on von Hippel has (2012) estimated that consumers (calling them
incisively as “backyard Edisons”) collectively invest more in their innovation
efforts than the largest corporation anywhere does in R&D. Although this kind of
calculation is prone to error, the ongoing transformation process resembles the
prediction made by Alvin Toffler. Toffler predicted as early as 1980 the rise of a
society of prosumers. Toffler identified various forms of prosumers but common
for all of them is that the role of producers and consumers are blurring and
merging in a way which inevitably transforms the relationship between the firm
and the customer. It has been suggested that firms do not create value for custo-
mers anymore but with customers.
Third, instead of seeing innovation from rational and linear perspectives, a
growing number of innovation studies argue that innovations are nonlinear pro-
cesses characterised by complexity and uncertainty (Van de Ven et al.,1999;
Fonseca,2002;Aasen,2009;Jalonen,2012). Conceptualising innovation as a
complex interaction is based on innumerable studies whose common denominator
is the understanding of innovation as an implemented new idea whose inception
and distribution are resolved in the interfaces between various actors. It has been
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demonstrated that through computer simulations, nonlinear interactions have the
potential of leading to both continuity and transformation at the same time (Van
de Ven et al.,2000). Innovations are emergent and result —if at all —from
dynamic interaction and feedback processes both within the organisation and
between the organisation and its surrounding environment. Presumably, the
challenges and mysteries around innovation have not, at any rate, decreased since
the innovation processes have crossed organisational boundaries.
Social media —Collective intelligence through social interaction
A bit pointedly, it can be argued that many behaviours that sociologists study are
nowadays taking place in social media. Seemingly, social media has become a
sweeping phenomenon with cultural, societal and economic consequences. In a
way social media is not an alternative to real life, but it is part of it (Shirky,2010).
Its history has dated back to the 1970s as social networking site that brought
together online diary writers into one community (Kaplan and Haenlain,2010).
Nowadays, a cautious estimation is that there are hundreds of different social
media platforms including, among others, ratings and reviews, media and file
sharing, social networking, crowdsourcing, social bookmarking, (micro)blogging
and shared workspaces, and the number of social media is growing exponentially.
At present, social media refers to a constellation of shared technologies that
derive their value from the participation of users through directly creating original
content, modifying existing material, contributing to a community dialogue and
integrating various media together to create something unique (Tapscott and
Williams,2007). A widely acknowledged view is that social media has changed
the ways how organisations communicate (publish and share content), collaborate
(collectively create content) and connect (network with other people and organi-
sations) (Lietsala and Sirkkunen,2008;Vuori,2011). Through social media,
organisations can acquire inspiration from their customers, suppliers and other
stakeholders. Social media means also new possibilities for testing the ideas that
are being developed within the organisation before their launch on the market.
Conventional wisdom has been that, due to social media, organisations are
obliged to change their behaviour. Instead of viewing the relationship between
social media and its consequences as causal (technological imperative), this paper
prefers the emergent perspective (cf. Markus and Robey,1988). It means that the
use and consequences of social media emerge unpredictably from complex
interactions. Social media has not caused new behaviours, but it has allowed them.
Although the behaviour or consequences of social media cannot be predicted
a priori (cf. Pfeffer,1982), it is, however, expected to have profound implications
particularly to organisations’knowledge processes. It has provided new
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possibilities to the internal use of external knowledge as well as to the external
exploitation of internal knowledge. Adapting Chesbrough (2003), social media has
provided new ways to the internal use of external knowledge (inbound knowledge)
and external exploitation of internal knowledge (outbound knowledge). The
promise of social media for innovation is explicit: Innovations are created when
capabilities and ideas possessed by different stakeholders are combined through
social media. Social media involves the potential of “collective intelligence”.
Collective intelligence refers to distributed intelligence, which arises from the
collaboration and competition of many individuals (Levy,1997;Garrido,2009;
Salminen,2012). It has been suggested that collective intelligence enables orga-
nisations to build on experience and avoid reinventing the wheel (Britt and Kreyer,
2011) and helps to facilitate the management of innovation (Svobodová and
Koudelková,2011).
Complexity theory —Emergence is the product of interaction
Collective intelligence cannot be planned but it emerges from the process where
two or more individuals interact. Due to nonlinear feedback (Richardson,2008)
predicting human behaviour is difficult (or impossible). The interplay between the
individuals produces the emergence of outcomes which cannot be predicted on the
basis what is known about individuals. Emergence is product of interaction. For
innovation this has two implications: first, attention should be paid to the inter-
action processes between different actors, and second, an “open systems”view
(instead of “closed system”) of the innovation processes should be favoured.
“Interaction process”refers herein to the activities of the actors —i.e., people;
representing themselves and/or organisations (de Boer and Bressers,2011)—
whereas “open systems”view includes the idea that resources flow into and out of
the organisation and that the system is embedded in larger systems (Maula,2006).
Stressing the significance of the interaction and the open systems view implies that
disturbances and triggers originating outside the organisation are processed en-
dogenously by the actors in the organisation.
Instead of a unified theory, “complexity lens”refers to a wide set of concepts
that can be used to explore the dynamics of organisations (Mitleton-Kelly,2003).
Complexity thinking means a multi-disciplinary approach in which comprehen-
sive, holistic thinking replaces a world-view where simplifying causal relations
and reductionism as well as a linear time concept, control over matters and
predictability are emphasised. The emergence engendered from interactive rela-
tionships between various phenomena is seen in complexity thinking as a natural
and fundamental part of the activity. In other words, “complexity theory offers a
structural (systemic) understanding of complexity”(Morcöl,2010). Complexity
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manifests itself in the relationships and interdependencies between actors, and the
systemic wholes they constitute together (Morcöl,2010). Hence, it can be argued
that contrary to the conventional notion of thinking, which stresses the achieve-
ment of an optimal or best solution to problems, the complexity lens indicates that
we need to think about the conditions that facilitate the “pro-innovation”emer-
gence. Instead of seeing innovation as a “rational”process that consists of “con-
secutive acts of creation and adoption of novelty, intended to lead to value creation
both for the creating and the adopting organisations”(Aasen,2009), it can be
supposed that innovation emerges from complex intra- and inter-organisational
interaction processes.
In complexity thinking, the utilisable terminology depends on the perspective
and what is being examined. Richardson (2008) has identified three complexity
schools: (i) the neo-reductionist school seeking to reveal the general principles
of complex systems “likened to the fundamental field equations of physics”, (ii)
the metaphorical school using complexity language as means for providing “a
powerful lens through which to see organizations”and management issues, (iii)
the critical pluralist school focusing “more on what we cannot explain than what
can be explained, …, when trying to understand the world around us”. This paper
exploits the metaphorical reading of complexity thinking. To avoid “anything goes
relativism”typical for metaphorical school (Richardson,2008), the paper also
draws on critical pluralism. Within the context of innovation, relevant complexity
concepts may be considered to be, at minimum, self-organisation, emergence,
feedback processes, nonlinearity, connectivity and diversity.
In the following, the paper presents a short description of the concepts’char-
acteristics based especially on works by Mitleton-Kelly (2003); Aasen (2009) and
Stacey (2010). Self-organisation refers to a more or less spontaneous process
without externally applied coercion or control. Self-organisation consists of phases
such as production of uncertainty, chaos, reduction of uncertainty and, finally, new
organisation. Emergence manifests itself as a complex organisational structure
growing out of simple rules. Emergence refers to the coming-into-being of novel,
“higher”level structures, patterns, processes, properties, dynamics and laws, and
how this more complex order arises out of the interactions among components that
make up the whole itself. Feedback processes are reflexive influence patterns that
arise from the interaction within the organisation and between the organisation and
its environment. Without feedback there is no emergence or self-organisation.
Nonlinearity implies that the behaviour may not depend on the values of the initial
conditions. Dynamic interactions are nonlinear —i.e., minor changes can produce
disproportionately major consequences and vice versa. Nonlinear behaviour is
unexpected, unplanned, unfamiliar sequences that may or may not be visible or
comprehensible. Connectivity points out that actions by any individual may affect
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(constrain or enable) the related individuals. This means that the whole is not to be
found in its parts. Diversity is the state or quality of being different. Diversity
spreads as a result of interdependencies. It has also been suggested that diversity is
the prerequisite source for unpredictable self-organising. Adapting Van de Ven
and Poole (1988) and Chae and Bloodgood (2006), the power of “complexity
lens”is that they can serve as “new terms or a new logic”to paradox. In the next
section, above mentioned complexity concepts are used for describing some
consequences of social media in innovation.
Social Media —Two Sides of the Same Coin
Complexity oriented literature identifies two premises for self-organisation which
also support both the usage of social media in innovation. First, self-organisation is
a process which needs energy. In the case organisation, this energy comes from
information. Social media promotes self-organisation because it potentially
removes the frictions in the access to a diverse set of information and knowledge.
This kind of thinking is explicitly present in the literature of innovation and social
media. Many researchers have argued that by engaging customers and other ex-
ternal stakeholders in innovation processes, organisations are able to increase
needed diversity (Berthon et al.,2007;Gorry and Westbrook,2011;Li and
Bernoff,2011). This is because customers commonly have ideas which organi-
sations have not thought of yet. Through social media, consumers become in-
volved in the modification of proprietary products and services, and the
distribution of these innovations. Social media is an appropriate context for cus-
tomer stories, which can be used for stimulating and challenging organisational
“wisdom”. The power of customer stories is that they serve as invitations to see
situations from others’points of view. By enabling customer stories to be heard,
social media helps to see things in a new light. Some have found that organisations
which have connected with customers through social media are amazed how
quickly they can generate ideas (Li and Bernoff,2011). The same holds true for
intra-organisational information flows. Schneckenberg (2009) and Vuori and
Okkonen (2012), for example, have shown that social media enables collaboration
within organisations in a way which helps to come up with new insight and
understanding. Second, it has been argued that self-organisation —when under-
stood as the interaction of individuals —is always local. It means that at any point
in time, individuals interact with only a small fraction of the total population of
some community (Aasen,2009;Stacey,2010). Worth noticing is that “local”does
not necessary mean that people are geographically located in the same place —
local interaction can also happen virtually. When conceptualising social media as a
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specific time and space, it can be seen as providing the energy, quality and context
to perform not only knowledge sharing activities, but also interpretation of am-
biguous information cues (cf., Nonaka et al.,2000). Social media multiplies the
possibilities for self-organisation as it expands the local interaction.
Self-organisation produces emergent behaviour, meaning a complex organisa-
tional structure growing out from the properties of its parts. In everyday language
“emergence”has conventionally been encapsulated into the phrases as “things just
happen”and “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. However, as
Richardson (2008) has argued these repetends imply too simplistic view of
emergence. This is because the new entities and wholes emerging include novel
properties in relation to the properties the constituent parts have. The emergent
entity is not just composed of constituent parts. Emergent entities can interact with
the parts from which they emerged (Richardson,2008). The process known as
downward causation means that the emergent entity also exerts some degree of
influence or constraints on its components (Blitz,1992;Richardson,2008).
Emergence results from the process where each individual continually decides
with which other actors it will engage, and what information and other resources it
will exchange with them. This is congruent with many studies which have shown
that social media have engendered radically new ways of interacting within and
across organisations (e.g., Constantinides and Fountain,2008;Yates and Paquette,
2011;Kietzmann et al.,2011; Hanna et al., 2011). By providing a context for
ongoing individual dialogues and narratives to be preserved, retained and shared,
social media may transform organisations’communication culture more pro-
foundly and long-lastingly. The decisions made in local level lead to global pat-
terns and vice versa.
Redeeming the promise related to self-organisation and emergence requires that
interaction is responsive in character. Responsiveness refers to interaction which
enables a situation where the ideas presented can be questioned and compared in a
fair atmosphere, and where the actors are ready to surrender their own thought-
steering psychic prisons (Popper,1996). In responsive interaction, the idea of one
objective truth is rejected. In the place of one right solution, responsive interaction
accepts the variety of subjective interpretations, which are also utilised (Stacey,
2010). Questioning and comparing ideas in the interpretation based on complexity
theory is a matter of beneficially applying feedback processes. Via feedback
processes, the organisation’s internal and external information is conveyed as part
of innovation activities. In complexity thinking, feedback is typically divided into
positive and negative feedback. Positive feedback concerns feedback that corro-
borates the impacts of information, whereas negative feed is balancing in character.
Both forms of feedback are needed in innovation: positive feedback stimulates the
organisation, providing the seeds of innovation, whereas negative feedback
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enables to rectify the course of actions when needed. While positive feedback
generates disorder, it also generates new possibilities and promotes “seeing dif-
ferently”. Correspondingly, negative feedback creates order by restricting alter-
natives, thereby supporting circumstances where “seeing differently”becomes
“doing differently”. Hence, the information transmitted in the feedback processes
can be seen as a necessary condition for needed renewal in innovation operations.
The importance of feedback processes is also widely recognised in social media
literature. Seemingly, social media provides new possibilities to give and receive
immediate feedback, which, in turn, enhances innovation (Johannessen and Olsen,
2010;Jussila et al.,2012). From the feedback perspective, the potential value of
social media is that it removes time delays and physical distance (Lampela and
Kärkkäinen,2008). Social media is also an important factor from the perspective
of democratisation of innovation (von Hippel,2005) as it makes it easier for people
to understand how they can give feedback (Denyer et al.,2011). On the whole, it
seems that consumers feel more engaged with organisations when they are able to
give feedback (Mangold and Faulds,2009). Feedback processes multiply the
connectivity within the organisation and between the organisation and its envi-
ronment. A circular dependency relationship is typical of feedback processes: This
means that the result of the previous situation is the stake in the following one. In
other words, what has happened before is included, and continues, in what happens
later.
Open and dynamic innovation is based on the idea of interaction and knowl-
edge sharing within and across organisational boundaries. An underlying pre-
sumption is that innovation can be achieved when a diverse set of individuals with
different knowledge bases are brought together. It is supposed that interaction
between heterogeneous individuals creates auspicious conditions for innovation to
happen. The reason is that flows from outside of the organisation may raise
awareness of possible problems previously unrecognised (Gorry and Westbrook,
2011). Social media has increased the organisation’s diversity as it creates more
opportunities to engage heterogeneous individuals into the organisation’s inno-
vation processes.
However, it should be noted that social media does not necessarily mean
positive development. For example, an emergent whole can be less than the sum of
its parts and the influence of nonlinear feedback processes may be exposed as a
limiting factor for organisational innovation. Information exchange within and
across organisations may produce unintended and unwanted consequences. This
is the case when, for example, an organisation exposes itself to informal social
media discussions about its products and services. Disorder arises if the tone of the
discussions contradicts the existing knowledge of the organisation. Instead of
enhanced knowledge base for innovation, the external information and customer
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experiences can be interpreted as a threat to the organisation’s stability. This is not
groundless fear as many studies suggest that social media provides an ideal context
for muckraking and spreading bad news (Zaslow,2010;Fournier and Avery,
2011;Park et al.,2012). Social media offers opportunities for discussion of shared
interest in ways which cannot be controlled by the organisation: “everything that
can be exposed will be exposed —for all intents and purposes”(Fournier and
Avery,2011). One obvious consequence of uncontrollability is abundance of
information. Denyer et al.,(2011), for example, have found that social media
creates information overload and ambiguity about what information is vital and
what is trivial. In addition to overload of information, social media also underpins
the complexity of information (Ahlqvist et al.,2010). This is because the stories
told in social media include not just factual knowledge, but also biased informa-
tion, rumours and urban legends. The point is, as Sax (2006) has put it: the stories
do not necessarily need to be believed in order to act. At worst case, organisations
find themselves “bombarded with information —too much, too fast, too late”
(cf., Edmunds and Morris,2000).
Although the interaction is local by its nature, it has also been suggested that,
in the age of social media, what is local almost inevitably becomes global, whether
the organisation wishes it to or not (Berthon et al.,2012). Social media has meant
the loss of control and increase of unpredictability (Bernoff and Li,2008). The
power has been taken from organisations by the individuals and communities that
create, share, and consume blogs, tweets, and so forth (Kietzmann et al.,2011).
Seemingly, things just happen without one particular reason. This means that
although individual decisions may seem intentional, the emerging whole is the
opposite of intention. A vast majority of the literature dealing with social media
recognises the unpredictability of what will emerge when organisations open their
borders to the flows of information and knowledge.
Worth noting is that feedback does not primarily refer to conscious, planned
operations; rather, it refers to the experience of the actors. Feedback is therefore a
question of a similar phenomenon which Watzlawick et al.,(1967) have described
with the expression “one cannot not communicate”. Many authors in the field
of social media have emphasised that most organisations have no choice: they
cannot remain nonparticipants, because their customers and other stakeholders
participate anyway. A concept of “groundswell”(Bernoff and Li,2008) has been
provided to refer to a social trend in which people use technologies to get the
things they need from each other, rather than from companies. Similarly, it has
been argued that social media enables customers to talk to one another and extends
traditional word-of-mouth communication (Mangold and Faulds,2009). Both
groundswell and word-of-mouth communication originate from the same roots: A
myriad of local interactions between individuals bring about a chain of events that
Dancing with the Paradox
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progress nonlinearly. The significance of the feedback processes promoted by
social media lies in that they enable the multiplication of small influential changes.
If things go badly, the disappointed customers may produce negative information
about organisations’products and spread it through their networks in the speed of
light (Park et al.,2012). That is to say that social media increases the nonlinear
characteristics of interaction as it multiplies the effects of initial condition. Instead
of collective wisdom (Briskin et al.,2009), negative information can be considered
more of a threat than a possibility and where ideas that contrast with the existing
power structure are rejected (March,1994). It means that the organisation does not
encounter its customers in the way that they are able to come to new insights that
were not available based on information from one source. The result can be called
as “innovation inertia”(cf., Herbig and Kramer,1993)—the emergent pattern
where renewal is based mostly on information, which reasserts the old power
structures between and within organisations. In the stage of “innovation inertia”,
the organisation fails to maintain its openness and diversity, which are typically
considered to be among the basic tasks of any organisation, if it is to be innovative.
Information provided for external stakeholders does not necessarily lead to more
innovation. Quite contrary, increased information may set up a nonlinear process
where the organisation nestles itself. The emergence includes the possibility that
the whole is less than its parts.
As shortly described above, social media involves two poles pulling opposite
directions. On one hand, social media opens up a vast range of possibilities to
enlarge and diversify the organisation’s knowledge base and hence potentially
improve its innovation process. On the other hand, social media has entailed new
threats such as information overload and information leakages which also have
consequences for the organisation’s innovation practices. With social media come
both positive and negative consequences. Seemingly, social media is a paradox
meaning contradiction in the sense of the simultaneous presence of opposing
forces, tensions or ideas, which cannot be resolved, nor eliminated (cf., Stacey,
2007). Although there is no option involving functional choice between opposing
tensions, the organisation must act. Therefore, instead of providing resolution to
the (insoluble) paradox entailed by social media, this paper explores next the way
of dealing with a paradox using complexity lens.
Coping with the Paradox of Being in Charge but not in Control
Social media opens organisations in a new way. By exposing itself to new in-
formation, the organisation pushes itself towards to the situation described in
complexity literature as “far-from-equilibrium”(Mitleton-Kelly,2003). In a state
H. Jalonen
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of “far-from-equilibrium”the organisation finds itself in a zone between stable and
chaotic states. Stable and chaotic states form poles pulling the organisation to
opposite directions. Intuitively thinking, this may sound like an unpleasant situ-
ation. However, “far-from-equilibrium”enables the organisation to poise itself at a
position of optimum fitness (Murray,2003). Interpreted through complexity lens,
the “far-from-equilibrium”is a typical paradox which contains seeds for good or
bad. “Far-from-equilibrium”implies the simultaneous presence of order- and
disorder-generating elements. Boisot (1999) has described the dual nature of “far-
from-equilibrium”as a state which enables the organisation’s two directions at the
same time, towards “fossilisation”and “disorganisation”. Disorganisation —al-
beit a concept with negative connotation —is prerequisite for the emergence of
new order.
The interplay between disorder and order is fundamental feature of innovation
process (e.g., Fonseca,2002;Mitleton-Kelly,2006;Aasen,2009). Mitleton-Kelly
(2006) and Aasen (2009) have described innovation as a chain where the pro-
duction of information is followed by imbalance or chaos, necessitating the
reduction of the amount of information, which finally enables the emergence of
novelty —i.e., innovation. Parallelly, Fonseca (2002) has characterised the self-
organisation as a process of producing “misunderstanding”. For Fonseca (2002)
“misunderstanding”means the dissipation occurring in conversations in which
individuals expose themselves to new information. Common for above-mentioned
interpretations is that they both are based on the logic that information acts as
driving force pushing organisations towards disorder, which, in turn, is seen as a
prerequisite for creating (new) order, innovation. However, the paradox is, as
Mitleton-Kelly (2003) and many others have suggested, disorder is necessary but
not sufficient condition for order creation. Sometimes self-organisation does not
simply happen, meaning that disorder becomes more or less permanent chaos
(or innovation inertia).
The concept of emergence provides a useful approach to disorder–order dy-
namics of innovation process. This is because it forces us to abandon rational and
linear perspective and to accept the messiness of innovation. Instead of aiming to
find out how innovation should happen, emergence perspective helps to under-
stand how innovation actually does happen. Inspired by the so-called Minnesota
studies (Van de Ven et al.,2000), Fonseca (2002) and (Aasen,2009) have argued
that innovation does not come from intentional acts per se. Rather they emerge as
the consequence of uncertain processes of communicative negotiations between
intentional individuals within and across organisations. Emergence happens in
social process and it is opposite of intention (Stacey,2007). This is not to argue
that people do not have intentions —they have, but people must negotiate their
intentions with other people pursuing other intentions (Aasen,2009). The process
Dancing with the Paradox
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is “illogical”and “political”as it contains not only factual knowledge, but also
reflection, emotion, imagination and conflict (Aasen,2009). To understand this,
emergence can be split into two intertwined cognitive processes: particularisation
and generalisation. Particularisation denotes local interaction, whereas generali-
sation refers to global patterning (Stacey,2007;Aasen,2009; originally Mead,
1967). Particularisation enables people to come “to what they are actually going to
do in a specific, contingent situation”(Aasen,2009). The human capacity to
generalise the particularities, in turn, makes the task of participating in complex
social acts more manageable (Aasen,2009). Particularisation and generalisation
processes are intertwined meaning that “no individual can avoid being in local
interaction”, where they at the same time express both particularised and gener-
alised themes (Aasen,2009). This means that at the same time when individuals
contribute to local level operations their actions influence generalised themes,
which, in turn, enable or constrain further action in local level. Individuals are
generalising as they are particularising and vice versa (Aasen,2009). Both parti-
cularisation and generalisation processes are important in innovation: particular-
isation makes different interpretations and conflicts visible; generalisation diverts
attention from particularities and from the local level to global patterning by
informing the “right”way to do things.
The above-mentioned indicates that the interest in the innovation process
should be directed towards the patterning processes of local self-organising
communicative interaction from where the global pattern emerges. However, as
hinted previously, self-organisation does not always lead to desirable emergence.
The paradox is that in certain conditions information provided through social
media pushes organisation to “far-from-equilibrium”implying the emergence of
novelty (i.e., innovation), while in other circumstances the result is just chaos
without any renewal.
In order to avoid “overly simplistic interpretations of complexity”(Richardson,
2008), this paper suggests that disorder–order dynamics cannot be understood
without taking into consideration the role of power. As any other form of inter-
action, social media interaction can be seen as power relation (cf., Elias,1998). It
means that power is not a thing certain people can wield over others, but a
relationship that arises and is shaped in interaction between people (Stacey,2010).
That is to say, one has power when he/she has succeeded in connecting individuals
into an integrated whole that has the ability to influence the development of the
state of affairs. From the innovation perspective, power can be seen “positively”as
a resource for achieving something. One of the most influential arguments for
“positive”power has been presented by Michel Foucault. According to Foucault
(1980), power is a productive force that extends to social settings. He rationalises
his argument by stating that if power were only used for constraining and
H. Jalonen
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inhibiting, it loses its legitimacy, even if it had been legitimate —i.e., people
would not obey that kind of force. The legitimacy of power depends on its ability
to create pleasure and produce new knowledge (Foucault,1980). The relationship
between power and knowledge can also be found in the texts by Hannah Arendt.
Arendt (2003) argues that power is akin to knowledge in the sense that they are
both resources that do not diminish when used. On the contrary, sharing them can
actuate a self-enforcing phenomenon.
The power aspect has also been present in the social media literature. It has
been suggested that social media tilts the balance of power from company to
customer (Mitleton-Kelly,2003). Others have found that social media empowers
consumers to create their own personalised experiences and provides channel via
which they can easily share their thoughts (Fournier and Avery,2011). In addition,
Denyer et al. (2012) have argued that social media can be used for political
purposes by managers implying that social media is no more “social”,“open”or
“participatory”than other communication methods. Implicitly, the above men-
tioned involves the idea that social media changes power relations within and
across organisations. According to Fournier and Avery (2011) the move from
secrecy to transparency involves a slippery, scary slope. Without questioning the
possible threats posed by transparency at such, worth noting is that these warnings
are motivated by the idea of “negative”power. From the negative perspective, a
loss of power means the reduction of one’s ability to uphold existing. However, as
noted before, power can be seen “positively”as a resource for achieving some-
thing. Positive power is an ability to act based on interaction (Jenkins,2009). This
is because interaction between people enables seeing not only one’s own point of
view but also that of others (Arendt,2003). In the social media literature, positive
power has many names such as collective intelligence, swarm intelligence,
crowdsourcing and wisdom of crowds (Levy,1997;Howe,2006). Despite small
differences in nuances, what is common for all of these is that they see social
media as a context where independent individuals can come up with a solution to a
cognitive problem in a way that cannot be achieved by isolated individuals
(Salminen,2012). From the power perspective, therefore, the potential of social
media within innovation has primarily to do with the thoughts and ideas born from
the interaction between various individuals.
A positive perspective to power implies that organisations’innovation capacity
will be enhanced as the number of individuals involved is increased. It seems,
though, that the equation still misses some element. Many studies have shown that
the more participants there are the more possible contradictions there can be.
Clegg et al. (2006), for example, have reminded that organisations are not unities
“represented by a single consciousness and a single point of view but rather as
interacting, and possibly competing, representations that might engage in some
Dancing with the Paradox
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dialogue with each other”. In order to promote seeing things from others’points of
view and create shared meaning, this paper argues that individuals must have a
certain level of trust for each other. Trust can be seen as a factor that has the
potential to promote interaction processes. It has been stated that trust is tested
first —only after that does the organisation have the ability to process meanings
(Luhmann,1995). Trust has two interrelated levels: personal and system (Luhmann,
1979). Personal trust serves as an element to overcome the uncertainty inherent
in the behaviour of other people whereas system trust is general and can be
enforced by strong norms with positive and negative sanctions (Luhmann,1979).
Both types of trust also play an important role in organisational innovation.
Personal trust helps to build up space for creativity innovation, and encourages
people to see things differently. Personal trust can be seen as a prerequisite for
introducing new ideas. It can be said that trust enables playing with ideas
(Hjorth,2004). System trust, in turn, plays an important role when there are
issues that include conflicts of interest. System trust is an important factor that
enables collaboration between people with conflicting interests. This is because
system trust acts as a kind of social adhesive, which provides the necessary
coherence in which different actors can express their views based on their
interests and values.
The role of trust in social media has been touched on in several studies. It has
been argued, for example, that social media provides a trustworthy source of
information regarding products and services (Mangold and Faulds,2009). It has
also been found that people are far more willing to trust their peers than a company
(Li and Bernoff,2011). Adapting Luhmann (1979), people’s trust on their peers
represents personal trust. Seemingly, social media strengthens personal trust as it
increases the transparency of interaction within organisations and between orga-
nisations and their stakeholders by making the thoughts of others more visible.
However, it has also been put that personal trust is not enough to explain the wider
processes. This is where system trust comes into play: “to be able to act within
different systems we must have confidence [system trust] in their functions”
(Jalava,2006). Personal trust yields to system trust if personal trust is socialised in
the form of normative rules and communication. In order to be normative, the rules
must be shared by the individuals. This necessitates interaction. Accelerating in-
teraction between individuals, social media helps to transform personal trust into
system trust. At best, social media can influence trust in the way that it becomes a
cultural resource for organisational innovation. Providing transparency, social
media invites the truth and serves as a stimulus for positive change (Fournier and
Avery,2011). Correlation between trust and social media can also be explained in
terms of identity. In the social media setting, identity refers to information that
portrays individuals in certain ways (Kietzmann et al.,2011). Social media changes
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the ways of how we deal with identity. It allows individuals to learn “detailed
information about their contacts, including personal backgrounds, interests and
whereabouts”(Valenzuela et al.,2009). As one officer from multinational company
has remarked, along with social media, people suddenly find they have a voice,
have an identity and can be acknowledged for their input (Fitzgerald,2012). This
information, in turn, reduce uncertainty about other individuals’intentions and
behaviours, helping to develop norms of trust and reciprocity, which Putnam
(2004)andValenzuela et al. (2009), among others, have deemed a necessary
condition for developing norms of trust and reciprocity. It is to say that trust carries
on when the knowledge ends. For organisations’innovation processes the message
is explicit: social media helps to build trustful atmosphere within organisations,
which, in turn, enables individuals to share different —including conflicting —
insights (cf., Wagner and Bolloju,2005;Schneckenberg,2009;Vuori and
Okkonen,2012).
Conclusion
Social media forces organisations to be interactive within and across their borders.
Some of the reviewed studies have shown that social media means less control-
lability and more unpredictability for organisations, whereas others have suggested
that social media provides organisations with new ways of interacting. Social
media enables customers and employees to “enact their opposition in the online
space, engaging in acts of protest that they thought unable to perform overtly and
directly”(Da Cunha and Orlikowski,2008). In doing so, social media opens up the
possibilities for “oppositional discourse”—a process of venting which Da Cunha
and Orlikowski (2008) have called as cathartic. Applied to innovation, the paradox
that arises is that, on the one hand, social media provides a context for exploiting
open innovation but, on the other hand, also complicates innovation processes
which, in turn, may yield a worse innovation performance. The fact that social
media inhibits the organisation to exploit control over the discussions about its
brand and its products taken place in social media, does not, however, mean that
organisations have no possibilities to take part in discussions. Quite contrary,
social media enables organisations’new ways of interacting within and across
their borders. Openness provided by social media enables organisations to mini-
mise the risk of excluding themselves from the discussions which may embrace
new ideas. Although social media increases the information glut, it also gives the
organisation means to cope with the information overload.
This paper has explored and discussed the paradox of social media in organi-
sations’innovation processes through the complexity lens. From complexity
Dancing with the Paradox
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perspective, social media enables the emergence of innovation through self-
organisation. In the self-organisation process individuals negotiate their conflicting
intentions. Whether these negotiations lead to the emergence of new order
(i.e., innovation) depends much on power and trust relations within and across
organisations. If power is seen as constructive capacity to achieve something
(not inhibit someone to achieve something) and if social media is used in a way
which strengthens the personal and systemic trust, then there is room for both
particularisation and generalisation of (new) ideas.
Worth noting is that many enabling factors —e.g., feedback processes and
diversity —have their “hidden sides”, i.e., they may create disorder. The value of
complexity thinking is that it makes these “hidden sides”visible and integral
elements of innovation. Diversity of actors, for example, potentially increases the
diversity of ideas, which, in turn, may yield disorder. Although disorder increases
uncertainty, it can be seen as a positive situation in innovation. As discussed,
disorder is a necessary condition for the process of self-organisation. Without
disorder there are no possibilities for the emergence of novelty.
When above mentioned is taken seriously, it can be argued that the paradox is
not just inherent but useful for the organisation’s innovation. The paradox entailed
by social media is useful because it maintains mutually useful exclusive opposites
and immunises the organisation against mutually detrimental reinforcing oppo-
sites. Promoting the presence of contradictory attributes social media creates a
balance between controllability and uncontrollability. The paper concludes that
the usefulness of social media in innovation depends on how it enables the
coexisting processes of order and disorder. This paradox “cannot be resolved, only
endlessly transformed”(cf., Aasen,2009). Seeing interaction as intrinsic to in-
novation activity, complexity thinking opens the paradox of being in charge but
not in control (cf., Shaw,2002) in the age of social media.
Acknowledgments
This paper has been funded by Yksityisyrittäjäin säätiö (Foundation for Sole
Traders), Liikesivistysrahasto —the Foundation for Economic Education, and
Turku University of Applied Sciences.
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