The Constitutive Power of Twitter: #Hashtag as Hypertext

Twitter is an increasingly used new information and communication technology (ICT) in organizational settings. Predominant research, however, tends to adopt functionalist standpoints and investigates new ICTs as platforms of information transmission through which organizations interact with their constituents. Such focus leaves little knowledge concerning the tensions new ICTs bring to organizational life. For a more nuanced understanding of the constitutive role of new ICTs in organizing, this paper unfolds a communication centered perspective and examines the strategic Twitter use in two organizations. The analysis illustrates how specific Twitter interactions, i.e., hashtags, become hypertexts—a type of authoritative texts—which simultaneously constitute an organizational actor or act as a pastiche of it. The study contributes to extant research by illustrating how hypertextuality is the process through which an organization is constituted in the interactions of both organizational and non-organizational members in both physical and virtual sites.