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 in what, taking into account Boyer's seminal work on scholarship, has been named digital scholarship. Specifically, the area of digital scholarship is investigating how digital and social technologies affect academic and research practices both at a systemic/infrastructural and emergent/personal levels. However, despite specific approaches have been adopted in the research strands of educational technology, information science and digital humanities, a unifying theoretical framework is missing and the topic is advancing with separate research agendas. Consequently, the research results are unable to guide in appropriate and relevant way practitioners' problems and future research, guiding the development of infrastructures underpinning researchers' practices or effective researchers' professional development. This seems to be the case of academic social network sites (ASNS) as specific digital infrastructures. While it is quite evident that ASNS are affecting the processes of academic and research practices, going beyond the emergent practices and providing a clear theoretical framework underlying these infrastructures would encompass guidance for future research of practices as well as for the development of suitable affordances. This study lays out the objective to analyse how social capital, a conceptual construct adopted as a specific requirement for knowledge sharing in social networks, applies to academic and research communities. It also adopts a socio-technical approach that analyses social media platforms as microsystems that combine the emergence of user practices and content with the plat¬form's organizational level. The framework distinguishes between three different levels of analysis to articulate reflection on ASNS: a macro-level, including the socio-economic layer that corresponds to the structural social capital (e.g., business model, governance, ownership); a meso-level, comprising the tecno-cultural layer that corresponds to the (distributed) cognitive social capital (e.g., technology, user/usage, content); and a micro-level, related to the networked scholar layer corresponding to the relational social capital. In its turn, the micro-level exploits social capital according to additional levels related to the networked scholar layer: a structural social capital that corresponds to the communication-collaboration-networking level; a cognitive social capital related to the knowledge sharing-networked learning; and a relational social capital concerning the identity-reputation-trust level. The framework's explanatory power does not lie so much in the single layers or ele¬ments, but in the connections between them, thus contributing to reveal how platforms and sociality mutually constitute each other in the specific field of digital scholarship.