I’m saving this paper by Kader Arslan and Matthias Trier to return to it later. This is a literature which I don’t know, beyond some general acquaintance within organisation studies, but it’s incredibly relevant for my work:
Culture, as the underlying theoretical concept is a complex phenomenon that is not very consistently operationalized in the SMP context. It is discussed by many scholars across various research fields – in fact, Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952) identified 164 definitions of culture. An early definition of culture was provided by Tylor (1871) as “the complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, custom and any other capabilities and habit acquired by man as a member of society” (p. 97). This also implies that certain personal traits (e.g., risk attitudes, age group, education level) may influence such beliefs and capabilities. On the conceptual level, Minkov (2013) differentiates “culture as a system of behaviors” (p. 14), representing a pattern of activity and “culture as a set of meanings” (p.14), representing shared meanings that are encoded into perceived norms. Waterloo (2018) states that these social norms refer to rules that inform individuals on what is socially agreed upon in a given social context. From such a shared set of norms and behaviors a distinctive social (group) identity emerges. Tajfel (1972) defines these actors’ social identity as “the individual’s knowledge that he belongs to certain social groups together with some emotional and value significance to him of this group membership” (p. 292).
On SMPs, culture of user groups is expressed in the various ways in which normative expectations are considered, values and attitudes are expressed in behaviors or meanings are assigned when using the platform for the different purposes, such as updating on a user’s experiences, thoughts or feelings (Waterloo 2018) and through the SMPs effort to tailor for different target groups (Ngai et al. 2015). In IS research, use cultures have not yet comprehensively been theorized, but related notions can be found, such as the very aggregated notion of ‘institutional logics’ (Oostervink et al. 2016) where individuals draw on shared “institutional logics, i.e., sets of goals, values and prescriptions” (Seidel and Berente 2013, p. 5). The notion of use culture is further related to the research discourse on the character and norms of user communities (Muniz and O´Guinn 2001), understood as “collections of actors whose membership in the collective provides social and cultural resources that shape their action” (Almandoz et al. 2016, p. 192). Almandoz et al. (2016) contrast geographical (i.e., offline) and affiliation-based (i.e., online) communities and state the importance of cultural elements in especially affiliation-based online communities, e.g., their conscious belonging and belief in specific values, goals, interests, products etc. because in comparison to geographical communities they lack place-bound elements. If SMPs use cultures are related to the underlying personal traits of online users, managers typically consider certain target group properties, e.g., age. Such demographics are also frequently reported by SMPs and utilized by companies to characterize and address selected target groups (Khan et al. 2019). Especially, when it comes to social media marketing as a key concern of organizations, recent research shows, that research only focusses partially on use cultures of selected SMPs without systematically contrasting user behaviors between different platforms from that perspective in more detail (Table 1).
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kader-Arslan-3/publication/379543774_Towards_a_Differentiation_Perspective_on_Social_Media_Platforms’_Affordances_and_Use_Cultures_-_An_organizing_Literature_Review/links/660e93f5b839e05a20bd4443/Towards-a-Differentiation-Perspective-on-Social-Media-Platforms-Affordances-and-Use-Cultures-An-organizing-Literature-Review.pdf
Mark Carrigan 