دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تحقیقات رسانه های اجتماعی در زمینه بازارهای نوظهور: سیستم های اطلاعاتی - امرالد 2018

Abstract

Purpose – Despite the potential of social media in emerging markets (EMs), only a few studies published in high-quality information systems (IS) journals that have addressed issues related to social media in the context of EMs. The purpose of this paper is to analyse existing research related to social media published in high-quality IS journals for exploring initial research trends, emerging themes, limitations and future research directions in the context of EMs. Design/methodology/approach – This study conducted a systematic review of 22 articles on social media, which were published in the “Senior Scholars Basket of IS Journals and Information Systems Frontiers” from 1997 to 2017. Manual literature search approach (i.e. screening through the table of contents of each journal) was employed to identify relevant articles. The content of relevant articles was systematically analysed and synthesised along with keyword analysis to understand research trends on social media related issues in the EMs context. Findings – The study identified four major themes from existing research on the social media in the context of EMs, namely: social media frameworks; social media and consumers; social media and organisations; and social media and society with the majority of the studies focussing on consumers. A single subject was found as the major limitation with studies analysed focussing on single platform/country/domain hindering the generalisability whereas including a new exogenous variable to improve the validity of existing studies emerged as main future research direction. Originality/value – This study conducted literature review on social media in EMs, which have not been undertaken yet. Moreover, it employed manual search (an effort and time-intensive approach) to overcome the shortcomings of keyword search to identify, locate, select and analyse the social media literature in the context of EMs.

6. Conclusion

The analysis of literature presented in this study revealed that majority of the social media studies (that were published in top IS journals) over the last 20 years in the context of EMs were conducted in the Chinese context. This can be attributed to China’s ring-fenced internet economy. These studies focussed on Chinese versions of global social media applications such as “WeChat” & “QQ”, which are similar to “WhatsApp”; “renren” which is similar to “Facebook” and so on. Despite this China’s internet is flourishing inside the wall (Gapper, 2016). This study contributes to both social media and EMs literature by identifying and analysing relevant literature and outlining major limitations as well as agenda for future research. This is of paramount importance given the background only a few existing studies (that are published in top IS journals) have focussed on social media exclusively in the context of EMs. The review presented in this paper identified four major themes of research in the context of emerging economies such as: social media frameworks; social media and consumers; social media and organisations; and social media and society. This review has also identified eight major limitations (see Table III) and five future research directions (see Table IV). The major limitation includes existing studies focussing on single platform/country/domain hindering the generalisability referred as “Single Subject”, whereas including a new exogenous variable to improve the validity of existing studies emerged as main future research direction. This study is not without its limitations. The narrow focus on high-quality “Senior Scholars’ Basket of Journals and ISF” is the major limitation as it resulted in only 22 studies for the review. Moreover, the classification of studies into various categories involved a qualitative judgement. Hence, it would be more appropriate to validate the classification categories and distribution of studies through large sample size in future. Although this study was ambitious to summarise research on a cross-disciplinary topic such as social media it has offered reasonably comprehensive review of research trend in emerging economies.