Managing Hybrid Social Media: A Case Study of Employees' Boundary Management Strategies on Wechat
通过华南一家养老社区的田野调查，研究员工在微信上如何管理工作与生活的边界，发现组织因素（如层级结构、领导风格）对边界行为有重要影响，并提出了新的边界行为类型。
ABSTRACT Social media has been integrated into our everyday life and is widely used for work communication and collaboration in many companies, which leads to blurring of the boundaries between work and life and makes employees' boundary management more difficult. In this research, drawing on the boundary management theoretical framework, I conduct a case study in a medium‐size (around 200 employees and 400 residents) retirement community in South China to examine employees' boundary management strategies, motivations and tensions on WeChat, a popular social media and a primary tool for work communication in China. Through ethnography and interviews, the research contributes to literatures on the sociology of work, employment relations and organization studies in revealing important influences of organizational factors on workplace boundary management including hierarchical structure, leadership style, cultural norms and values which are largely overlooked previously. The findings also show complex boundary management behaviours that beyond the four typical types of behaviours (i.e., open, audience, content and hybrid) of the theoretical framework and I refine it by generating new types of behaviours: open‐audience, hybrid‐open and hybrid‐content. Contributions, limitations and future research directions are discussed in the end.