Social Media and Knowledge Sharing. The Impact on Social Value Creation and Organisational Performance of UK Social Enterprises

View/ Open
PhD Thesis (2.318Mb)
Download
Publication date
2019Author
Akhtar, GulrezSupervisor
Wallace, JamesCornelius, Nelarine
Rights

The University of Bradford theses are licenced under a Creative Commons Licence.
Institution
University of BradfordDepartment
Faculty of Management, Law and Social SciencesAwarded
2019
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Governments and society are looking, increasingly, to specialist organisations such as social enterprises to address complex social problems, leading to a rise in their numbers. These organisations regularly access difficult to reach, disadvantaged and disenfranchised communities and tend to be smaller in size and turnover than for-profit commercial organisations and typically more resource limited. The growth in corporate social responsibility and individual citizenship has helped to redress this limitation with essential altruistic resource donations from these external agencies to supplement traditional sources of support. Social media is the obvious medium for social enterprises to acquire knowledge and resources to support their social agendas. Following a sequential mixed methods design, a model is developed to appraise the impact of the various contributions from social media networks on social value creation. This model is predicated on the extant literature, mostly on for-profit organisations, contextualised and a questionnaire developed to represent social entrepreneurship from interviews with social enterprises in the UK. Data is collected from two hundred and thirty-one UK based social enterprises whose mission is to provide social value for their target populations. The model is validated for factors that lead from knowledge sharing due to social media networking to concomitant increases in social provision by fitting to these data. Findings demonstrate that social media use leads to increases in social value creation through knowledge sharing. The novel construct of enhanced organisational performance is shown as seminal in enabling shared knowledge gained from social media to be converted into increased social value.Type
ThesisQualification name
PhDCollections
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Social Entrepreneurship and Social Business: Retrospective and Prospective ResearchBarki, E.; Comini, G.; Cunliffe, Ann L.; Hart, S.; Rai, S. (2015)
-
Health Inequalities at the Heart of the Social Work Curriculum.Fish, J.; Karban, Kate (2014-01)Efforts to reduce the widening gap between the health and social well-being of people within and between countries have become an urgent priority for politicians and policymakers. The Rio Declaration called on governments worldwide to promote and strengthen universal access to social services and to work in partnership to promote health equity and foster more inclusive societies. This paper contributes to international debates about the role of social work in promoting social justice by reducing social and health inequalities. Despite clear commitments to promote good health, there is a notable absence of a social determinants of health perspective in international social work curricula standards. The current review of social work education in England presents a timely opportunity to integrate such a perspective in teaching and learning and to disseminate this more widely. Employing the concepts of downstream and upstream interventions, the first part of the paper examines the distinctiveness of the social work contribution to this global agenda. In the second part of the paper, we consider how the content of learning activities about health inequalities can be incorporated in international social work curricula, namely, human rights, using Gypsy and Traveller families as an exemplar, inter-professional education and international perspectives.
-
Relationships, Personal Communities and Visible Facial DifferenceSmall, Neil A.; Sargeant, Anita R.; Newell, Robert J.; Peacock, Rosemary Elizabeth (University of BradfordFaculty of Health Studies, 2015)People with visible facial difference often experience other people reacting negatively to their appearance. For many, this is part of everyday life. Research has identified social support as critical in adaptation processes. This is the case both for those whose facial difference was apparent at birth, and those who experienced injury or illness. There is a lack of a comprehensive theoretical construct for exploring how personal communities provide resources needed by adults to live well with visible facial difference. The combination of semi-structured interviews and creation of personal community maps provided opportunities to explore the interplay between respondent accounts and patterns of relationships people are embedded within. Seventeen adults with visible facial difference and two unaffected ‘significant others’ were interviewed. The findings provide evidence that personal communities are important social spaces for negotiation of resources that enable adults to feel connected, valued and safer within wider communities. Social support was not described as a property of the individual, but as experienced with combinations of people that change according to situation, place, or time. A diversity of personal community patterns were found, largely consistent with findings from Spencer and Pahl (2006), with one variation which increased intimate support. Some personal communities were less supportive and consequently people were at risk of isolation. Processes within personal communities were helpful both in dealing with negative social environments and in helping establish different versions of ‘normal’ life. The importance of focussing on social contexts, when seeking to understand how people live with visible facial differences, is highlighted.