Crowdsourcing creativity in government : state of the field in the four research paradigms

Abstract

Creativity, innovation, openness and involving citizens in decision making belong to a set of efforts undertaken by the government. This is possible thanks to crowdsourcing that is a tool to communicate with citizens and that is a source of knowledge and that provides new, creative ideas. However, despite the research intensity in the area of crowdsourcing creativity in government, the research results obtained to date are still ambiguous and fragmentary. Research on crowdsourcing government is often limited to interpretive traditions. This gives an incomplete picture of government crowdsourcing since three additional research paradigms are omitted: interpretative, postmodern, and critical. Our ambition is to raise awareness about the presence of many paradigms in crowdsourcing government research. The aim of this article is to present crowdsourcing government from the perspective of four paradigms by Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan. We are trying to achieve this by presenting a review of research on crowdsourcing government taking into consideration four paradigms: positivist, interpretative, critical, and postmodern. We suggest that a single paradigm is not able to provide a complete picture of crowdsourcing government, and thus we seek interactions between the paradigms and postulate multi-paradigmatic research that may lead to further development of knowledge