Puzzlements, Proposals, and Questions: Constructing Communicative Coworkership on Internal Social Media

This paper explores how communicative coworkership is enacted in relation to colleagues on internal social media (ISM) in a Danish hospital. The study conducts a multi-level discourse analysis of 142 posts and 534 comments shared by employees on the hospital’s ISM during the Covid-19 pandemic. The study demonstrates how employees discursively construct communicative coworkership on ISM, and extends the understanding of communicative coworkership and organizational agency. Communicative coworkership is an inherent part of modern organizations, and especially valuable during a crisis. Consequently, organizations should nurture communicative coworkership by providing an ISM arena where employees can share thoughts, frustrations and knowledge with each other. This study adds to the emerging research on communicative coworkership by showing how it is discursively constructed on ISM between employees.