For years, Information Systems (IS) scholarship has been concerned with the role of technology on organisational structure and processes, particularly trying to understand how people (social) and technology (material) interact to affect organisational strategy, structure and processes (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al. 2014). Technology has a causal relationship with organisational structure and processes, which is located on the interaction of people and technology that consider the IS phenomena as an enactment of people’s interaction with technological artefacts in their social context (Avgerou 2017). Thus, understanding the influence of technology needs a consideration of structure, process and social activities, which can provide insight on organisational strategy as well as the process of organising within the organisation. Structure can be understood as a clearly defined pattern of activity in which, ideally, every series of action is functionally related to the purpose of the organisation (Harper 2015), whereas process is a systematic series of actions directed by organisational members towards a goal (Harris et al. 2013). The central locus of processes and structure are the social activities, which define strategy (Jarzabkowski 2005).

The relationship between structure and strategy is reciprocal (Takahashi 2017) as strategy influences the structure, and structure enables, constrains and shapes strategy. Structure as a context in which decisions are made and observed (Lawton 2017) can be classified into three main dimensions that are: centralisation, formalization and complexity (Wu et al. 2010). Centralisation is the extent to which the right to make decisions and evaluate activities is concentrated (Wagner et al. 2014). Formalization is the extent to which an organisation deploys rules and procedures to guide decisions and activities (Ashkenas et al. 2015). Complexity is a situation whereby an organisation is composed of many interrelated parts. For example, an organisation that concurrently has several levels, a broad span of control and multiple geographic locations is considered as a complex organisation (Wagner et al. 2014).

Structure relates to an enacted set of rules and resources which mediate social action through facilities, norms and interpretive schemes (Giddens 1984). This means knowledge of structure elucidates social behaviour. Thus, an understanding of structure can assist the understanding of social media usage and impact since it is the interplay of social and technical factors that determine user engagement on social media (Idemudia et al. 2016). Therefore, to understand social media influence in organisations, one must consider practice, which is an interplay between people and technology, which enacts structure. Thus, the next section will explore the strategy as practice perspective as the theoretical lens for this research.