A Social Network Analysis of Organization Development on Social Media

Abstract

Organization development (OD) is an established field that scholar-practitioners have defined in many ways. Social media is one way that the world currently communicates. This dissertation selects big data from the social media site Twitter and analyzes it through a social network analysis lens. From this large amount of data, a definition of the field of OD on Twitter is developed and compared with the definitions presented by other scholars. The definition of OD developed here comes from purely empirical data based on 5.7 million tweets.

Tweets are analyzed to determine how the field of organization development, as a social media network represented on Twitter, compares to other social Twitter networks in the management and organizational studies arena in terms of volume of tweets, topics discussed, the relationships between these networks, and the geographical locations of the users. This study uses global data; the locations of the organization development tweet writers are compared with the locations of those who tweet about other management and organizational studies topics.

This research involves a qualitative, grounded theory approach utilizing social network analysis as a quantitative analysis of the data. The analysis determines that organization development does have a presence on Twitter, although it is significantly smaller than that on similar networks. The OD network does discuss topics similar to those of other networks but not to the same degree. The relationships between the OD network and management and organizational studies networks are explored in depth.