DOCTORAL RESEARCH ABSTRACT

MATTHEW SHAUN CRAVEN MANCHESTER BUSINESS SCHOOL E ND OF YEAR REVIEW

Working Title Understanding decision making in complex social environments: The case of deleterious disclosive behaviours in online social networks. Abstract The success of social networking services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and others, means that ever-larger segments of an individual's real world social network are present within the virtual space. The result is that individuals are maintaining increasingly diverse social networks. While such size and diversity may at first appear to offer an easy and convenient means of creating, maintaining and harvesting social capital, this benefit does not arrive completely devoid of cost or risk. The bringing together of many previously separate social groups, into a single social space, can present particular dangers for those who maintain identity roles that are not wholly consistent. The need to manage multiple identities in a single online social space is an enormous and highly problematic challenge, which requires the individual to remap the boundaries of appropriateness within a new and often changing social context. Those who operate identities in these environments are no longer just a friend, just a work colleague or just an acquaintance. The complexity and diversity of their social network means that those who manage complex social networks are all of these things simultaneously. For those who succeed in reaching the safe middle ground, their online activities pose little or no risk to their social and professional relationships, but for those who do not, the consequences can be considerable. The objective of my upcoming research is to explicate the mechanisms that underlie this process of boundary remapping, and explain how and why individuals sometimes fail in this endeavor.