Should I Click the “Like” Button For My Colleague? Domesticating Social Media Affordance in the Workplace

Guided by domestication theory, this article examines the contextualized and grounded process of how people understand and practice using social media “Likes” in the workplace. Taking the Likes of WeChat Moments in the Chinese workplace as a case, we interviewed 52 people from different professions and identified a multilayered liking practice by focusing on the ambiguity, negotiations, and contradictions caused by using WeChat Likes in social interactions. We contribute to the domestication research literature by showing the importance of being sensitive to culture context and need for multiple dimensions of social analysis.