Hypertextuality and Social Media

Twitter Communication as Co-Constitutive of Organization in Situated Spaces and Times

From a CCO standpoint, an organization is conceptualized as constituted in and emerging out of the interplay of material, technological, and discursive interactions (Putnam & Mumby, 2014). This argument is not simply based on the idea that preformed social groups use (or do not use) technologies such as Twitter for organizing social life. Instead, a communication-centered lens acknowledges that there is a “more complex process of mutual interaction and stabilization where technologies are involved in constituting subjects in diverse and pervasive ways” (Halford & Savage, 2010, p. 952). The organization emerges as a collective actor from local domains of practice through two steps (Taylor & Van Every, 2000): First, the experience of the situated practices is displayed in the form of verbal representations (conversations) that furnish a composite image of the whole organization. Second, the representations generated are transformed again by being inscribed into texts that express the point of view of the organization as a single unit, where a collective identity begins to take shape. Texts become the mode of being of the organization (Cooren, 2004) and are simultaneously the inputs to and outcomes of conversation, forming a self-organizing loop. By emerging in such self-referential processes, texts acquire a life of their own as actors ascribe agency to them. These texts not only form relationships and make direct sense inside the organization but also grant individuals situated outside the organization an active role in the processes of co-constituting what the organization is (Schoeneborn & Scherer, 2012).

Research indicates that not only communicative acts among organizational members (intraorganizational acts) but also interorganizational communicative interactions contribute to the emergence of a collective organizational identity. Studies suggest that external communicative acts that occur in virtual locales, such as those created by social media technologies, can constitute organization from “the outside” (Schoeneborn & Scherer, 2012, p. 996). In this vein, researchers have theorized that organizations are established in the configuring of spaces and times through a collectively negotiated narrative that enables the perpetuation of the organization as an entity (Vásquez & Cooren, 2013).

Seeing organizations as a configuration of spaces and times enables one to regard the constitution of an organization as part of a (re)configured reality accomplished through the daily conversations and texts of organizational and nonorganizational members in both real and virtual sites. Specifically, organizational texts created by social media technologies, such as hashtags, are texts with “open authorship” and the potential to coproduce the organization in virtual spaces and times. Hashtags are a type of organizational text with particular characteristics, such as fluidity and promiscuity (Jackson, 2007), that allow both organizational and nonorganizational members to have an active role in the authoring process. This is possible because hashtags are subject to a specific type of textual relationship: hypertextuality (Genette, 1997).

Hypertextuality, as developed in literary studies, explores the intended and self-conscious relationships between texts and the effects these have. Allen (2000) noted that a hypertext allows authors to compete to intentionally add fragments of new texts with the purpose of maintaining or altering its original meaning and direction in an ironic way or in the manner of a travesty or pastiche. By being retweeted, hashtags allow both organizational and nonorganizational members to use the text to temporarily constitute an organization in a particular way. Subsequently, hypertexts are “the work of appropriating information from disparate sources into a coherent whole, [they are] literally and genuinely constitutive” (Jackson, 2007, p. 409). Thus, they may hold unpredictable implications for organizational communication. Hypertexts allow multiple authors to access organizational texts independent of time and space and give these authors the ability to associate the texts with people and content in manifold ways. As different constituents intentionally alter the hypertexts, their becoming as a collective construction is what generates the ability of the hypertexts to exhibit agency and co-constitute the organization (Cooren, 2004). To position our analysis, tweets are defined as highly customizable textual artifacts, and hashtags are defined as hypertexts—that is, a type of organizational text that is authored by multiple authors and that is intentionally and explicitly based on other texts. However, a hypertext is not simply an amalgam of other textual units with several meanings. Instead, these connections situate the text within existing nets of power, simultaneously creating the text’s ability to signify, enable, and regulate subjectivities.

In summary, communication-centered and sociomateriality perspectives reverse traditional thinking about the organizational use of Twitter. These perspectives start not from a priori assumptions about the existence of actors who communicate through the social media technology (Veil et al., 2012) but from the constitutive and paradoxical capacity of Twitter communication itself. The two perspectives allow researchers to transgress the conventional dichotomies between communication and technology and show how connections between and among communicative actions co-constitute an organization across multiple spaces and times. To gain a richer understanding of the constitutive tensions that arise when organizations use social media technologies such as Twitter, the following research question was explored:

Multiple Case Study

Two organizations (Alpha and Beta ³ ) that actively engaged in developing and implementing communication strategies on Twitter were selected for this study. Two different types of organizations (an international cooperative and a multinational fast-food chain) were chosen to obtain a diversity of parameters for the purpose of comparison (Baxter & Jack, 2008). Alpha is an international cooperative operating in a wide range of services such as advocacy, banking, and tourism. As a cooperative, Alpha has emphasized the need to become more open and visible and to communicate the importance of cooperatives to a wide range of audiences. It chose Twitter as a main tool in its strategic communication. This was the rationale for selecting Alpha from a network of 20 cooperative organizations to which the first author had access as part of a 9-month research project. Alpha was in the first year of using Twitter and had disseminated 2,819 tweets in total at the time of investigation. Alpha had only one corporate Twitter account (with 956 subscribers to its Twitter feed and following 398 users). Alpha had developed the hashtag #coopweek for a campaign called “The Cooperative Week,” which was aimed at increasing the visibility of its business practices.

Beta is a multinational fast-food chain that has faced ongoing public scrutiny from critical stakeholders and has been using Twitter, in a similar way as Alpha, as a communication tool for signaling transparency and emphasizing to its constituents the social and environmental sustainability of its actions. In contrast to Alpha, Beta had a more established presence on Twitter. At the time of the study, both our analysis of Beta’s social media data and managers’ interview accounts indicated that Beta’s most important Twitter account was @Beta, which focused on Beta’s global market. Subsequently, @Beta became our subject of investigation. @Beta had 14,140 tweets, 938,282 subscribers, and was following 8,266 users. Covering its other international markets, Beta used 10 other Twitter accounts, however, at a much lower rate: for example, @BetaEurope (having 432 tweets, 1,412 followers, and following 235 users), or @BetaCanada (having 4,269 tweets, 2,309 followers, and following 1,136 users). The rationale for examining Alpha and Beta was that although they contrasted in terms of organizational structure, the companies had similar ideals of disclosure toward both internal and external audiences such as becoming “open” and “transparent” with the help of Twitter (Alpha Annual Report, ⁴ 2012; Beta Annual Report, 2012). This offered a fruitful reference point for comparison. In one of Beta’s corporate sustainability campaigns, the hashtag #BetaSupply was created and used on the @Beta account for raising awareness of its socially responsible supply chain activities.

Data Collection and Analysis

The primary data were collected in the years 2012 and 2013 from both the physical sites of the organizations and the virtual Twitter sites. We navigated both physical and virtual communities and treated the research settings as hybrid settings where the physical and virtual overlapped. The goal was to incorporate different types of qualitative data to provide diverse perspectives about the use of social media technologies by organizations. The data set comprised (a) eight interviews with top and middle managers from Alpha; (b) five interviews with both middle and top managers from Beta; (c) 40 hr of participation and observation in meetings concerning social media strategies at Alpha, generating 156 double-spaced pages of field notes; (d) 1,219 tweets from Alpha collected during the 9 months of investigation starting in February 2012 (from a total of 2,819 tweets, we purposively selected the first 300 tweets from the first days of the campaign to grasp the initial reactions, and subsequently, we singled out, through systematic random selection, every 2nd tweet to grasp the development over time); and (e) a sample of 1,423 tweets from Beta for the 9 months after the creation of the hashtag #BetaSupply in January 2012 (we purposively selected from a total of 14,140 tweets the first 450 tweets from the first days of the campaign to grasp the massive initial reactions, and subsequently we chose, through systematic random sampling, every 14th tweet to grasp the development over time). The tweets were sourced from the publicly available hashtags during the observed periods.

The rationale for conducting semistructured interviews was to gain unanticipated insights into the use of Twitter and a more nuanced understanding of users’ tweets. The interview questionnaire addressed main topics concerning the rationale, resources, and challenges underpinning the use of Twitter in daily interactions. Respondents were top and middle managers with an average age of 41 years. The interviews lasted approximately 45 min. The interviewees were selected because of their central role in the formulation and implementation of social media strategies. The secondary data set consisted of three interviews with Beta’s managers in international news media publications. The interviews were accessed through a search of the LexisNexis database using the following keywords: “Beta,” “Twitter,” “#Betasupply,” and “campaign.” This search led to 34 articles from international press outlets, of which three were selected, as these articles were the only ones that provided information concerning the Twitter communication strategies of Beta.

All data sources were coded using the constant comparative method (Charmaz, 2001). The unit of analysis for the tweet corpus was Twitter interactions (tweets and hashtags). To answer the research question, tweets of both organizational and nonorganizational members that either mentioned one of the organizations or included the hashtags developed by the organizations were analyzed. Next, a manual two-step coding analysis was conducted. In the first step, tweets in English that targeted Alpha and Beta were identified. Each interaction was classified based on the author’s status as an organizational or nonorganizational member. Each Twitter user had such information displayed on their accounts. For instance, the Twitter accounts of organizational members are labeled on Twitter with a “verified” mark and information such as “communication manager at Alpha.” The second coding step involved content analysis to identify the nature of the hashtag—that is, whether the tweets were supporting or contesting the direction of the hashtags as developed by Alpha and Beta in their communication campaigns. To detect support or opposition of the direction of the hashtag, all tweets were coded for supportive, opposing, or neutral statements. The unit of analysis was a tweet, whereby each tweet could only incorporate one code. To ensure reliability of coding, a sample of 150 tweets from both organizations was coded and compared by two coders, resulting in a reliability coefficient of 0.94 (Holsti, 1969).

To substantiate the two-step coding results of the tweets, the codes were contrasted and compared with the data gathered from the observations and interviews. Subsequently, the recurring codes were labeled across all of the data material and the Twitter interactions that performed a co-constitutive process on Beta’s or Alpha’s identity through their hypertextual properties were located. That is, we identified the interactions that included the linguistic markers for Alpha and Beta and mapped out what the tweets “did” as they were performed, as well as their power effects and development. The etic-emic codes were refined in an iterative fashion through a two-level analysis (see Table 1). In the first step, codes such as “facilitating awareness” and “coproducing we’ness” were clustered into a theme labeled “coproducing organization,” which amassed the supportive tweets from both organizational members and nonmembers. In the second step, codes such as “losing or endangering control” were clustered into a theme labeled “contesting organization,” which comprised opposing tweets from nonorganizational members. Subsequently, the first theme shows how, through the process of hypertextuality, a hashtag coproduces an organization as an entity with an identity and purpose across spaces and times in the direction intended by the organization. The second theme indicates how the hashtag acted as a pastiche (i.e., a vehicle of contestation of the identity it was designed to bring into existence). The following analysis is presented in terms of these two themes.

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Table 1.

Two-Level Matrix of Codes and Themes.

Codes and themes	Definition/explanation	Examples
1. (Co)producing organization
Facilitating awareness	Why do you use Twitter in stakeholder interactions?	“It’s a way to inspire people who have no idea about who we are” (Manager, Alpha).
		“Co-op means gaining valuable experience and networks in an industry I’m passionate about #coopweek” (Tweet, user).
(Co)producing “we-ness”	What are the repercussions of using Twitter to communicate to your constituents?	“It’s very much an internal awareness of who we are from the process” (Manager, Beta).
2. Contesting organization
Losing control	Why do you use Twitter intraorganizationally?	“[T]he situation gets almost out of control as information is handled differently on Twitter” (Manager, Beta).
Co-constituting spatiotemporal dimensions that endanger control	Has Twitter changed the way you interact with various audiences?	“Yes. It’s a dangerous terrain, [the conversation is] puff . . . it can go anywhere” (Manager, Alpha).

Hashtags as (Co)Producers of an Organization Across Multiple Spaces and Times

The analysis shows how the social media interactions of Alpha and Beta act as textual agents (Cooren, 2004) that invite or enforce individuals to act (e.g., retweet) to coproduce or reproduce a particular organizational actor. For instance, in the case of Alpha, Twitter interaction was an important organizational practice for identity building across realms where the virtual and real overlapped. The following field note fragment illustrates this notion:

James [Alpha’s communications manager] is counting again his followers on Twitter. It’s the second time this week. He keeps record of it by handwriting in his little black agenda he keeps in his jacket’s pocket. While jotting down, he says with a smile, probably in becoming aware that I was looking curiously at what he was writing, “Well, I guess there should be a software that keeps track of it. We have 614 followers now. Do you think it’s possible to reach 1,000 by the end of the month?” When I asked why, he added in a vigorous tone, “Because this is how we get to be known. Nowadays, if people don’t know us out there,” pointing to the Twitter web page on his screen, “it’s almost like we don’t exist.”

The manager’s response was indicative of the tone and content of many formal and informal meetings concerning the use of social media in Alpha. It suggests how organizational members have embraced Twitter interactions as an important element of Alpha’s identity creation. Twitter functions as a communicative practice that allows Alpha access to a wide range of constituents. It also coproduces Alpha’s identity in the spatiotemporal dimensions of unknown audiences.

For instance, while preparing for an event, Alpha’s communications manager took a picture of the company’s communication materials and then said enthusiastically, “We must tweet them.” He then tweeted the message, hence inscribing Alpha in the following tweet: “@Alpha Delegate packs for the 23/4 event just delivered to office. Want to participate? Register here #coopweek.” The message with the hashtag was retweeted 40 times by organizational and nonorganizational members with supportive statements. For example, 3 hr later, the governmental representative Gamma added the message, “Congratulations to @Alpha for bringing sustainability to business,” to the #coopweek hashtag. By retweeting it, Gamma relocated and introduced the organizational text to its 178 subscribers. While checking Twitter, the manager exclaimed, “Gamma retweeted us without any contact or relation to them whatsoever. That’s so great.” The episode illustrates the hypertextual qualities of the hashtag through its ability to relocate tweets and co-constitute Alpha’s identity in the spatiotemporal locales of other potentially unknown or unrelated users, such as Gamma and Gamma’s subscribers. Alpha’s manager alluded to the capacity of Twitter interactions to coproduce Alpha and “show” what Alpha is as an entity across multiple sites:

We’ve just started using Twitter this year. For us it is a new strategic tool for communicating to the world but also to show our members who we are. Our view is that the duty of the cooperative is to inspire people into the cooperative way—those who have no idea about who we are. We certainly use #coopweek to do that.

In Beta’s case, Twitter engagement was similarly regarded as a resource for co-constituting desired representations of the organization. Beta’s communications manager remarked, “By using Twitter we would come across as being willing to accept constructive criticism, would raise the level of transparency for the company, and it might also have some congenial benefits of creating some additional media opportunities.” In the case of Beta, the hashtag #BetaSupply was developed by organizational members to represent the organization as a socially responsible actor. Beta was inscribed into a concrete form (tweets), which unfolded on a wider scale across swaths of time and space as communicative episodes (hashtags) to coproduce the organization as an entity with an ethical and sustainable identity:

Meet some of the hard-working people dedicated to providing Beta with quality food everyday #BetaSupply. (Beta, 2012)

When [yo]u make something w[ith] pride, people can taste it—Beta potato supplier #BetaSupply. (Beta, 2012)

During the investigation period, by being retweeted 321 times with supportive statements from both organizational and nonorganizational members, the hashtag exerted its performative function. This was possible because Beta’s interactions persisted past the time of their initial posting and had consequences long past the initial point of presentation (Leonardi et al., 2013). Through its hypertextuality, the hashtag exhibited the capacity to be one of the several constitutive agents in Beta’s self-formation process. When asked about the relevance of tweets, Beta’s communications manager referred to them as an external communicative practice that creates a sense of unity and sameness internally among organizational members (Cheney et al., 2014). The Twitter interactions targeted at Beta were situated in—and at the same time created—fluid spaces and times external to the organization, which facilitated a shared awareness among organizational members:

We, as with all of our communications, are very focused on the internal side of things. And even though Twitter is external and unsteady spacing, we do see it as a great vehicle to inform people within the Beta system. It’s very much an internal awareness of who we are from the process. That’s a really big part of why we do it. (Manager, Beta)

In the cases of both Alpha and Beta, the hashtags created an asynchronous communication context—that is, they enabled tweets to stay outside “real time” (Jackson, 2007). The hashtag stabilized the organization’s identity. At the same time, by being retweeted by users, the hashtag created an ongoing situational present in which each recipient of the tweet was incorporated. Due to their visibility and persistence, the hashtags #BetaSupply and #coopweek were continuously and repeatedly accessed and mashed-up with new content and audiences and thus kept alive by organizational and nonorganizational members during the observed period. As an interviewee stated,

We find [Twitter] very positive as the main advantage is getting through to talk to people that we don’t know. What we do find is that every so often you get it right, as we did with the #coopweek, and your message gets retweeted by somebody and by somebody else. Then suddenly it is spread out widely and you just keep on being out there. This makes you known in a way that you could not have not done by yourself. (Manager, Alpha)

Due to their affordances, the hashtags became resources that could coproduce organizational identities across multiple spaces and times in often uncontrollable ways. As one manager suggested,

We really focus on how we communicate on social media because people now are on Twitter all the time. But you need to be careful because it is not a one-to-one conversation like we are having now. It’s “puff” . . . it can go anywhere. (Manager, Alpha)

Both Alpha and Beta Twitter interactions illustrate the capacity to prompt both organizational and nonorganizational members to take action (i.e., retweet) to materially represent the organization as a collective actor in simultaneous and successive “heres and nows” (Vásquez & Cooren, 2013, p. 33). The analysis revealed that the Twitter query based on the terms Alpha, coop week provided relatively balanced distribution. The data corpus for Alpha consisted of 565 tweets of the hashtag #coopweek by organizational members, equaling 46% of all tweets, and 654 retweets of the hashtag by nonorganizational members, equaling 54%. In the case of Beta, the query “Beta, Beta supply” showed that the hashtag #BetaSupply was subject to fewer tweets (396 or 15%) by organizational members and more tweets (1,027 or 85%) by nonorganizational members (see Figure 1). The unequal distribution can be explained given that Beta is a globally known fast-food company with a well-established Twitter account.

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Figure 1.

Membership analysis of tweets in Alpha and Beta.

In short, based on this analysis, social media technologies such as Twitter, rather than being conduits for communication, have a complex role as they have structural properties (Gibbs et al., 2013) and shape how organizations are co-constituted in both inter- and intraorganizational discursive-material interactions.

Hashtags as Contesting an Organization Across Multiple Spaces and Times

The second part of the analysis revealed how social media technologies can introduce tensions in the CCO. In the case of Alpha, the hashtag #coopweek, in being subject to processes of hypertextuality, was coauthored by nonorganizational members in accordance with its original direction. The results in the case of Alpha showed no tweets with opposing content, and 1,102 tweets (or 90%) contained supportive statements from both organizational and nonorganizational members (e.g., “Co-op means gaining valuable experience & networks in an industry I’m passionate about #coopweek”). Only 117 tweets (10%) were neutral (e.g., “Goodmornin @Alpha. day #3 of Coopweek”). In contrast, in the case of Beta, the hashtag #BetaSupply was “hijacked” by nonorganizational members (customers, activists, etc.) and became a vehicle for contesting the specific actor it was initially intended to (de)inscribe. The analysis showed that 1,082 tweets (76%) contained opposing statements from nonorganizational members (e.g., “I’m just getting coffee, but I feel dirty being here #Betasupply”), and 321 tweets (22%) contained supportive statements from users, both organizational and nonorganizational members. Twenty tweets, or 1%, were neutral (e.g., “At @Beta with Tamara! #Beta #BetaSupply”; Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Content analysis of tweets in Alpha and Beta.

Once in the Twitterverse, the hashtags are extracted from their local, original meanings by being retweeted by users. Through the process of retweeting, the hashtags become a collective construction and gain agency as they come to represent the organization as a collective actor. In the case of Alpha, the hashtag was coauthored by nonorganizational members with an average of 53 retweets per day, according to the original organizational direction of sustaining an ethical and responsible business actor: “Co-op@Alpha changed my life, provides opportunity beyond job-personal & professional development #coopweek”. A detailed display of tweets and actors can be found in Figure 3. For Alpha, 88% of tweets by organizational members accounted for supportive statements and 12% for neutral statements. Similarly, 92% of tweets by nonorganizational members were supportive and 7% were neutral. For Beta, tweets of organizational members were mainly positive (95%) or neutral (5%). In contrast, nonorganizational members expressed mainly opposing statements (89%). However, in addition to a few neutral statements (1%), a minority of supportive statements was identified (10%).

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Figure 3.

Display of the content analysis and membership of tweets in Alpha and Beta.

The results indicate that in the case of Beta, the hashtag showed the capacity to destabilize the initial organizational identity it was designed for and become a tool of contestation used by nonorganizational members. Within a few hours of the launch of the campaign, the fragile meaning that #BetaSupply carried was disrupted when an activist nongovernmental organization (NGO) “took over” the hashtag by retweeting it to illustrate the unsustainable ingredients used in Beta’s food products: “#BetaSupply: Liquid chicken nuggets. Who’s hungry for Beta?”. The first tweet was followed by several thousand opposing tweets over the next 5 months. Beta, meanwhile, attempted unsuccessfully to contain the opposition and shift the public attention by tweeting 24 times the new hashtag #MeetOurSuppliers: “He’s what you’d call a ‘Beef Snob.’ Meet Steve, our beef supplier who always delivers on quality #MeetOurSuppliers” (Beta, 2012). However, this strategy was ineffective as the hashtag received no attention from nonorganizational members. Instead, the hashtag #BetaSupply gained traction as a hypertext in being retweeted in several thousand tweets containing mainly opposing statements. As a specific type of organizational text, hypertext allows nonorganizational members to compete to intentionally associate fragments of text with new ideas with the purpose of visibly altering its original meaning and direction in the manner of a pastiche:

These #BetaSupply never get old, kinda like a box of Beta’s 10 piece Chicken Nuggets left in the sun for a week #BetaSupply.

Hospitalised for food poisoning after eating [at] Beta in 1989. Never ate there again and became a vegetarian. Should have sued #BetaSupply.

#BetaSupply products contain dimethylpolysiloxane, an anti-foaming agent also used in caulks and sealants and Silly Putty.

The hashtag was also communicated by news media outlets, which contributed to contesting Beta across multiple spatiotemporal dimensions. A manager at Beta commented, “Then the hashtag with all the comments and arguments against us started to appear in other places on the Internet and the media started running stories on it.” The hypertextual qualities of the hashtag highlighted how individuals engaged in discursive struggle by using #BetaSupply to contest Beta’s self-portrayal as a responsible company on Twitter. At the same time, the hashtag created strategic problems that the organization’s managers had to tackle. As one Beta manager declared, “We saw that it wasn’t going as planned. Clearly, the campaign moved in a different direction and the organization did not have the setup to handle the situation. It gave people a channel to criticize.” Although the hashtag was trending on Twitter for 1 week after its initial creation (with an average of 1,000 retweets per day in the first week) as a vehicle of contestation to its original direction, it received significant attention in the following months as well. For example, between January 24 and January 30, 2013, 12 months after its inception, the hashtag reached 1,569 users through 23 retweets created by an NGO: “How #Beta health-washes its #junkfood and influences dietitians—#BetaSupply”.

Due to the combined affordances of persistence, visibility, relocation, and modification, a situation arises wherein people and content from different sources are publicly associated in indiscriminate and unforeseen ways. The hypertextual qualities of the hashtag led, for example, to the emergence of the hijacked organizational text #BetaSupply. As a manager for Beta said, “We have situations where things almost get out of control as information is handled in a certain way on Twitter. From now on, we need to be ready for most scenarios.” The tweeted hashtag acts as a hypertext that temporarily inscribes and describes the organization, co-constituting it as a collective actor. In the case of Alpha, nonorganizational members coauthored the hashtag and coproduced Alpha in accordance with its original direction as a responsible business actor: “As Rapporteur, good to see governmental bodies say #CSR is more effective #coopweek”.

In the case of Beta, however, the hashtag allowed individuals to extract it from its original context and reconfigure it for stigmatizing Beta and co-constituting it as a deceitful actor across time and space: “Toy-based junk-food marketing should go the way of lead paint, child labor, and asbestos. Fight goes on. #BetaSupply”. In both cases, the hashtag is a powerful textual artifact and an object of discursive struggle because it was originally authored by the organization. However, through processes of hypertextuality, it is also a pastiche of the organizational actor it was initially created to sustain.

Nonorganizational members have the opportunity to alter the organizational text in ironic or subversive ways because the hashtag cannot be amended or canceled by its original organizational author. To this extent, the hashtag—apart from playing a key role in associating people and content and making organizational actions visible—has agency because it acts as a coproducer of organizational identities. The practice of mashing up hashtags with images and/or videos rather than using them to diffuse information signifies movement, mutation, and active translation (Khasnabish, 2008). Such active translation helps explain how Twitter alters traditional notions of control in the communication strategies of Alpha and Beta, not through transmission of information but rather through active mutation of collective actors across multiple spatial and temporal contexts. As a manager at Alpha alludes,

Because the hashtag is so uncontrollable . . . you need to be very careful. Twitter is a really dangerous terrain. If you want control, don’t turn the computer on. Here you cannot control the messages in a way that traditionally you could.

In other words, given its affordances, the hashtag is persistent yet promiscuous and has the power to shape organizational identities. The hashtag obtains its power from the collective construction of both organizational and nonorganizational members who, by retweeting it, always “reactivate” it “for another next first time” (Garfinkel, 1992, p. 186).

In sum, these findings illustrate that in the case of Alpha, the hashtag #coopweek was subject to processes of hypertextuality, making it a textual artifact capable of coproducing Alpha as a sustainable organization across multiple spaces and times, not least through the interactions of nonorganizational members. In contrast, in Beta’s case, the hashtag #BetaSupply had the capacity not only to co-constitute Beta as an ethical actor but also acted as a pastiche of the organization it was designed to coproduce. It allowed nonorganizational members to hijack it and represent Beta as a dishonest entity. The two cases illustrate that the use of Twitter as a communication practice often has paradoxical implications that go beyond functional understandings of classification and information transmission. Social media technologies such as Twitter are involved in co-constituting actors in ubiquitous and often uncontrollable ways that may bring inadvertent consequences with respect to organization and coordination.