Boundaries of Logics in Municipality Communicators’ Facebook Practice: Towards a New Public Service Competence

With an increased use of external online platforms, digital government logics are gradually intertwined with external, algorithmic, crowd-influenced value logics of social media platforms. This new scene especially affects administration, which can no longer neutrally deliver public service, but becomes involved in processes of consideration and judging what rules and traditions seem most appropriate in the situation. Through deep interviews and workshops with municipal communicators, we examine this balancing act when communicators use social media for external communication. We use a practice perspective to characterize and conceptualize an emerging approach to public service

Balancing the Social Media Seesaw in Public Sector: A Sociomaterial Perspective

The use of social media in the public sector changes the professionals\u27 everyday work practice. This paper sheds light on the emerging challenges of using social media as a part of work, based on the analysis of three contexts within the public sector in Sweden and through the lens of sociomateriality and affordances. The approach is interpretive field studies with a narrative analysis, where we interpret and analyse key elements of the storylines, focusing on the transition to social media use among professionals (nurses, municipal communicators, and physicians) in the three contexts. Social media enables an open work environment where information is visible and potentially spreadable to an unknown audience. The process of interacting with an unknown audience and finding a professional tone is analysed here as context collapse. The unknown, and at times imagined complex audience, makes it hard to balance the seesaw between friendliness on the one hand and an authoritative tone on the other; a tonality which leaves most of the potential audience unreached. The interplay between social media and the professionals shapes the professionals’ practice. We analyse this interplaying practice more specifically, as sociomateriality in action

Användbarhet hos processinriktade kommunikationsmodeller vid interkulturell kommunikation : en litteraturstudie

Syftet med studien är att utreda sambandet mellan kultur, kognitiva självscheman och kommunikativt beteende samt att undersöka hur befintliga processinriktade kommunikationsmodeller hanterar kommunikation mellan individer från olika kulturer. Den kulturella variation som studeras är individualism-kollektivism och studien avser kommunikation mellan två individer där den ena kommunikationsparten kommer från en individualistisk kultur och den andra från en kollektivistisk kultur. Studien visar att kultur och självscheman ömsesidigt påverkar varandra och att såväl den kulturella bakgrunden som självschemana påverkar det kommunikativa beteendet. Två kulturspecifika kommunikationsstilar, högkontextkommunikation och lågkontextkommunikation, definieras. De båda kommunikationsstilarna används sedan som underlag i analysen av Shannon och Weavers, Schramms och Newcombs kommunikationsmodeller. Shannon och Weavers modell och Schramms första modell visar sig vara alltför linjära, utan utrymme för feedback medan Schramms tredje modell illustrerar kommunikationen som en loop av delad information. Shannon och Weavers modell är också alltför tekniskt inriktad, medan Newcombs modell beskriver kommunikationen som en social företeelse

Social Media as Sociomaterial Service : On Practicing Public Service Innovation in Municipalities

Governments are in need to innovate public service. They struggle with complex societal problems, decreased citizen trust and the work of adapting to new demands related to how service should be delivered to fit contemporary living. Inspired by success stories from the private sector's "open innovation" approaches, governments are complementing internal competence with knowledge resources of external actors such as citizens. One increasingly growing strategy for knowledge expansion beyond government boundaries has been to use social media platforms, e.g. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This strategy has been shown to be especially effective at a local government level (henceforth municipality) where citizens are geographically close to the government and where government manages activities that citizens rely on in their daily lives. Despite an expansive rise of social media use in municipalities, and efforts to see beyond a traditional and New Public Management approach to public service, there is little knowledge about the participatory and innovative capacity of social media in a government context. This knowledge gap is reflected in researchers' and municipal administrators' uncertainty as to how to make use of social media for improvement of public service and how to handle tensions about what is possible to do with social media and what is legitimate to do as a public servant. The aim of the thesis is thus to map, unpack and conceptualize social media practice by municipal communicators to understand how tensions and dynamics between social media mechanisms and government rationales are shaping the practice and how new emerging practices can be understood as public service innovation. The research questions of the thesis are: RQ1: How are social mediamechanisms supporting different public service rationales?; RQ2: How is public service enacted in the social media practice by municipal communicators?; RQ 3: How can social media practice by municipal communicators be understood as public service innovation? With an engaged scholarship research approach, related research on social medialogic, e-government, e-governance and digital public service innovation, and with the help of the theoretical perspectives "service innovation," "practice perspective" and "sociomateriality," the thesis contributes extended insights into how social media platform mechanisms support different government rationales in processes of sociomaterial service, and how such practice can be understood as creative processes towards public service innovation. As a practical contribution I propose that both communicators and managers in government engage together in networks of others working with social media and to discuss for instance the mission of the government in relation to the aim of using social media, what tensions arise in the social media practice and why, and how algorithms are shaping the social media practice.Delarbeten som inte är publicerade finns ej med i posten för avhandlingen</p

Information systems for sustainable remote workplaces

This review discusses the challenges associated with the sustainability of remote workplaces, which have become more prevalent due to the growing trend of work digitalization and the pandemic-induced push to remote work. These challenges are highlighted in literature across various disciplines, including information systems, but these discourses have remained isolated from each other. In this review, we consolidated and synthesized research on remote work from the perspective of individual workers by reviewing 187 articles published between 1999 and 2020 in recognized academic journals from fields including information systems, organizational studies, economics, human resources, sociology, and psychology. We identified five key themes that concern opportunities and challenges to sustainable remote workplaces: (1) key characteristics, (2) work-life boundaries; (3) health and well-being; (4) social interaction, and (5) leadership. Building on our findings we created a framework that recognizes two interrelated categories of factors influencing remote workplace sustainability – rigid base characteristics and contextual remote workplace variables – that together shape the trajectory of remote workplace sustainability in the long term. The framework also identifies the potential role of information systems in modulating the impact of the base characteristics to build continuities that encourage more sustainable remote workplaces. The paper concludes by offering a research agenda for information systems for sustainable remote workplaces based on the three IS theoretical frames: inclusion, dignity, and boundary objects

Unpacking Social Media to explore professionals work practice

Organizations are inspired by the massive social media use in the private domain and try to filter interactions and knowledge sharing in socialmedia also for professional purposes. Even if the interest in social media isstrong in the private domain, the use is far less widespread in organizations. The trajectory of traditional information spread through web platforms into use of new and open social media platforms stresses organization's and professionals to enrich user-generated content and take part in and enhance social networking. This study explore how social media is used in organizations and how professionals´ practice is challenged by use of social media of reaching out, sharing knowledge and interaction with target groups. Through illustration of two research cases; municipality-citizens' interactions and university-industry collaborations, three affordances of social media practice are emerging; incentives, perceptions and openness, where social media is constituted as the boundary objec

Flipped And Open Seminars As A Method For Work Integrated Learning

Since 2002 University West, Sweden has had a mission from the Swedish government to develop methods for work integrated learning (WIL). WIL is thus a “trademark” of the university and the university is continuously developing teaching models to enhance a synergy between theory and practice with the goal to improve education and students’ lifelong learning. A challenge in such work is a decreasing engagement among students to participate in seminars at campus, especially during periods of internship. In the study underlying this paper we therefore explore a new teaching and learning method that aims to stimulate students to come to campus and to discuss their experiences with peer students and teachers during their internship.The internship and the seminars are organized as a ‘WIL course’ in the fifth semester of the candidate program ‘Digital Media’. As part of the course the students spend four days a week in a workplace where they contribute substantially to the work at the workplace. One day a week they spend at campus to reflect, write and discuss topics related to the work and organization at the workplace e.g. organizational culture, how a work day is organized, how design work is organized, and how the workplace treats its customers. The students and teachers meet once every second week for a seminar where they discuss the above-mentioned themes. The reflections made at the seminars and the conversations are important for the learning goals at the course. However, the teachers experience a moderate interest from the students’ side to participate and the students tend to be ill prepared.To increase the value and learning for the students, a new approach for better structure and engagement has been introduced, where students in beforehand writtenly reflect on questions about their workplace in relation to the theme of the week. They write in open and shared documents so that all students before the seminare can take part of each others reflections and as such come to the seminar with a wider perspective on the particular theme. The seminar is then held at the campus where the themes are discussed and workplaces compared with help of a shared matrix where the students can place their workplace regarding level of structure, formality, creativity etc . As such the seminar has a ‘flipped’ character and the ICT tools for learning used are open and editable over time for all participants.The empirical material is based on 24 hours participant observations, 10 students’ written reflections and the course curricula. The findings show that the flipped and open approach to the seminars has made the students more engaged in reflections about their workplace, not only during the seminar at campus but also during their work at the workplace. The shared document stimulates reflections of differences between workplaces that has not been so clear before, and the matrix has helped the students to take the reflections to a higher level by reflecting over organizational culture and workplace conditions. By comparing each other’s experiences from a spectrum of different aspects/themes they get a more nuanced picture of the skills and competences needed in the workplace, and they get more strengthened in their professional role. The recurrent discussions over time during the course therefore contribute to make the students more experienced than they would had been by only having got the experience from their own workplace