Towards a multilevel framework for analysing academic social network sites: A networked socio-Technical perspective

Digital technology and social media are progressively transforming scholarly practices and academic identity into what has been named digital scholarship. However, while specific approaches to the topic have been adopted within diverse research strands, a unifying theoretical framework has yet to emerge and as a result the topic is advancing with separate research agendas. This is placing severe limits on the potential applicability of research results throughout academia, on the development of suitable infrastructures underpinning and supporting researchers' practices, and on the effectiveness of their professional development. This also seems to apply to academic social network sites (ASNS) as digital infrastructures for scholars. While it is quite evident that ASNS are impacting on academic and research, a clear theoretical framework is needed in order for emergent practices to become established. This study analyses a range of theories in the effort to produce a multi-layered and multi-Theory framework that might underpin research and practices related to ASNS as platforms for supporting digital scholarship. Firstly, the study adopts a socio-Technical approach to analyse social media platforms as microsystems that integrate emergent user practices and content at the organizational level. Secondly, it focuses on how social capital, a conceptual construct adopted as a specific requirement for knowledge sharing in social networks, applies to academic and research communities. The emerging framework for reflecting on ASNS comprises three different levels of analysis: 1) a macro-level, which constitutes the socio-economic layer corresponding to structural social capital; 2) a meso-level, which comprises the techno-cultural layer corresponding to (distributed) cognitive social capital; and 3) a micro-level, which constitutes the networked scholar layer corresponding to relational social capital. Within the micro-level, different kinds of social capital are exploited at different sub-levels of the networked scholar layer: structural social capital corresponding to the networking sub-level; (individual) cognitive social capital related to the knowledge-sharing sub-level; and relational social capital concerning the identity sub-level. The framework's expressive power does not lie so much in the single layers or elements, but in the connections between them, which reveal how platforms and sociality are tightly interrelated in the specific field of academic social networking. The paper also examines the implications of the study and provides suggestions for future research.