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Virtual Embeddedness of Platform Companies on Social Media

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Virtual Embeddedness of Platform Companies on Social Media Virtual Embeddedness of Platform Companies on Social Media Student Name: Tran Vu Thanh Huyen Student Number: 480869 Supervisor: Dr. Ju-Sung (Jay) Lee Master Media Studies - Media & Business Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication Erasmus University Rotterdam Master's Thesis June 2019 1 ABSTRACT Embeddedness refers to the fact that social relationships under an industrial context affect organizational activities and outcomes. The emergence of the Internet and the advance of communication technologies have promoted the concept of virtual embeddedness, which combines the ideas of structural embeddedness and virtuality. In the era of social media, the connection between organizations and the formation of virtual communities in social media platforms, such as Facebook, have been facilitated by social media affordances. More specifically, companies can be embedded in their online networks through different kinds of affiliation linkages, for example, liking one another’s pages on Facebook. The advances of the Internet and technologies are not only changing the way in which actors in the industry interact, but also enable the emergence of a new market, the (digital) platform market The thesis aims to examine the pressure of embeddedness and isomorphism to activities of organizations on social media by analyzing the Facebook liking networks and topic modeling of platform companies in their population. A qualitative mixed-methods approach that includes some digital methods – network analysis and topic modeling – is applied. Overall, the finding reveals that the Facebook liking networks of the focal companies are sparse and fragmented, indicating the organizations in the networks are less connected. However, in the company- company network via topics the companies are linked with one another, indicating that they are embedded by the overlapping topics. The expectation that the companies become similar to each other via online content (i.e. topics) due to the pressure of embeddedness and isomorphism happens. In addition, the findings reveal that the companies in the network also manage to resist the isomorphism by topic misalignments, which make them distinctive in relation to others in their networks. KEYWORDS: Social Media, Virtual Embeddedness, Population Ecology, Platform Market, Network Analysis 2 Table of Contents ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................................. 2 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 5 1.1 The impact of social media on organizational performance and the industry .................... 5 1.2 Embeddedness of organizations in population ecology ......................................................... 6 1.3 Academic and societal relevance ................................................................................................. 8 2. Theoretical framework ........................................................................................................................ 10 2.1 Organizational ecology and its elements ................................................................................. 10 2.1.1 Organizational ecology ......................................................................................................... 10 2.1.2 Elements of organizational ecology ................................................................................... 11 2.2 Social media and social networking sites ................................................................................. 14 2.2.1 Social media ............................................................................................................................ 14 2.2.2 Social networking sites (SNSs) and Facebook .................................................................. 15 2.2.3 Social media as a competitive tool of organizations in population ecology ............. 16 2.3 Embeddedness conceptualization ............................................................................................ 18 2.3.1 Social embeddedness ........................................................................................................... 18 2.3.2 Virtual embeddedness .......................................................................................................... 21 2.4 The impact of embeddedness on organizational activities ................................................. 22 2.4.1 The role of social embeddedness to business performance ........................................ 22 2.4.2 The role of virtual embeddedness to relational capital management .........................23 2.5 B2B platform market ....................................................................................................................25 3. Methodology ....................................................................................................................................... 27 3.1 Choice of methods ....................................................................................................................... 27 3.1.1 Social network analysis .......................................................................................................... 27 3.1.2 Topic modeling ..................................................................................................................... 28 3.2 Data sample and collection ....................................................................................................... 29 3.3 Operationalization and Analysis ................................................................................................ 30 3.3.1 Network analysis ................................................................................................................... 30 3.3.2 Topic modeling ......................................................................................................................33 3.4 Validity and reliability ................................................................................................................... 34 4. Results ................................................................................................................................................ 36 3 4.1 Virtual embeddedness reflected through the Facebook liking network ........................... 36 4.1.1 Detection of ecosystem and relational capital of three focal companies.................. 36 4.1.2 Virtual embeddedness reflected of each core company .............................................. 38 4.1.3 Niche width detection of each core company ............................................................... 44 4.1.4 Niche structure and virtual embeddedness of the three core companies in their population ecology ........................................................................................................................ 45 4.2 Virtual embeddedness reflected through the company-company network via topics .. 47 4.2.1 Company network via topics .............................................................................................. 48 4.2.2 Overlapping topics in the company-company network ............................................... 50 4.2.3 Non-overlapping topics of three core companies ........................................................ 56 5. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 64 5.1 Main findings ................................................................................................................................. 64 5.1.1 Virtual embeddedness reflected through the Facebook liking network ..................... 64 5.1.2 Virtual embeddedness reflected through the company-company network via topics ........................................................................................................................................................... 65 5.2 Theoretical and managerial implications ................................................................................. 67 5.3 Limitations of the study .............................................................................................................. 69 5.4 Suggestions for future research ................................................................................................ 70 References ................................................................................................................................................... 71 Appendix A ................................................................................................................................................ 83 Appendix B ................................................................................................................................................ 84 4 1. Introduction 1.1 The impact of social media on organizational performance and the industry Identifying industry boundaries and industry competitiveness is central to organizational study. An organization is a social unit comprising individuals that endeavor to achieve collective goals (Bílková et al., 2018). In the study of organizational performance, the resource-based perspective is a fundamental approach as resources and the transformation of resources within an organization determine their success (Bílková et al., 2018). When it comes to the features of organizational change,
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