Narrow Results

The purpose of this paper is to explore the connections between social media and quality management. Although the development of social media and web 2.0 has had a substantial impact on many management disciplines, the connections to quality management remain largely unexplored. The research question is: How do the advances in social media affect the theory and practice of quality management in industry and organisations? This paper is conceptual and is built on a review of research on social media marketing and management as well as quality management, and a conceptual analysis. Connections between quality management and social media marketing and management are identified and a framework is constructed. The research limitation is that this paper is conceptual and does not present any new empirical data. The implication is that it suggests a new framework for handling quality management and social media marketing and management built on previous research that will be useful for further studies. The framework developed in this paper will be useful for practitioners of quality management and/or social media marketing and management in clarifying the connections and implications of previous research. Although social media profoundly influence organisations and individuals alike, the amount of research on the connection of social media to quality management has hitherto been scant.

We investigate how citizens engage in storytelling on social media. We look at how citizens’ stories about a city’s industrial past are brought forward in a Facebook group. Institutional storytelling neglects parts of the city’s industrial area. We track how users establish a co-created counternarrative by means of sharing fragmented memories (posts) and how this narrative rests in parallel to the institutionalized narrative. Employing a case study approach, we applied a variety of qualitative methods, such as qualitative interviews and participant observation, as a means to investigate social media as a digital space for keeping memories alive. Consequently, we conducted a thematic narrative analysis of the data. Citizens use social media to tell their stories and share memories, and they value the opportunity to do so as provided by the Internet: First, users reminisce experiences connected to blue-collar work and the industrial past. Second, users acknowledge the benefits of post-industrial changes (e.g., less pollution) without devaluating the nostalgia. Third, users wish for the industrial past being included in institutional storytelling. Finally, the Facebook group is a space to vent about perceived conflicts of identity, here the elite, as included in the institutionalized narrative, and the working class, as glossed over. Our study provided theoretical insights on the notion of counternarratives, which get collected coherently when shared in a virtual space. These web-mediated narratives run parallel to institutionalized master narratives. In practice, governing bodies might benefit from these insights into class consciousness and storytelling and include citizens’ narratives in strategic communication.