Attention, quarantine tributes: Boundary negotiation and maintenance in a facebook community of practice

• Main Author: Mamac, Marinel Eurlyne M.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2022
• Subjects: Social media; Youth movements; Social groups; Negotiation; Film and Media Studies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdm_comm/2; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=etdm_comm
• Institution: De La Salle University

One way that Filipinos have found solutions to shared challenges amidst the Covid-19 pandemic is through a Facebook group called Quarantine Tribute Tips (QTT), the boundaries of which have shifted over time. This study draws from both organizational communication literature and community of practice (CoP) theory to explore how these boundaries are negotiated at the group’s center and its peripheries, taking into account the power relations at work in resolving conflict between the two. Critics of CoP theory have outlined how power manifests within CoPs, while both organizational communication researchers and CoP studies have focused on formal workplace-based groups, with the former exploring managements’ boundary logics and methods of control, and the latter focusing on the role of boundary objects and crossers. By conceptualizing QTT as a CoP that utilizes an emergent form of organizing, the study is able to take a more holistic look at how boundary negotiation works in social media groups. After four focus group discussions, examined through constant comparison and micro-interlocutor analyses, the findings indicate how platforms make possible certain types of boundary crossers and objects, as well as shape different methods of control employed by QTT group managers, whose moderation embodies contradictory boundary logics. Lastly, power manifests in boundary management both through formal hierarchies in group managers and regular members, but also in whose voices dominate group conversations. In a time of physical distancing, this study hopes to open more doors to researching CoPs and emergent forms of organizing, and how their boundaries might be maintained, on social media.