#Metoo and the Carnivalesque: The Refraction of Everyday Sexism through Social Media

Translation theory has examined how messages travel across different organizational fields. As organisation scholars continue to question how messages are shaped across online and offline domains, this paper examines how the ‘carnivalesque’ nature of social media both helps and hinders message translation in the context of the socio-politically charged #Metoo online movement against sexual harassment and assaults. Through analysis of a corpus of over 500,000 tweets incorporating the #Metoo and planned interviews with senior managers, we focus on examining how social media events around sexual harassment are translated into organisational life. In doing so, we elaborate on how the social media carnival causes refraction of #metoo messages into organizational practices and policies in three powerful ways: messages become constitutive (performative in creating major change), ceremonial (symbolic in creating minor change) and coercive (dangerous in subverting change). This paper provides insight into how macro-level discourses are incorporated into micro organizational practices and the barriers to translation therein, through the lens of social media. In doing so, it contributes to discussions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a digital age, with implications for theory and practice.