Transforming Governance and Organizational Form in Collaborative E-government
- Publication date
- Publisher
- 2019
Abstract
The increasing digitalization in the process and the end-result of public service, a phenomenon widely
known as e-government, is changing the range and ways of collaboration among governments and their
stakeholders. Especially with the pervasive use of social media for knowledge sharing, today’s local
governments are teaming up with their non-government stakeholders in an unprecedented width and depth
to exchange knowledge and resources to build digital public services together. While these collaborative
initiatives benefit from the complementation of knowledge and resources that are associated with extensive
participation, these initiatives also exist under a shadow of confusion and conflict when organizing the
changing range and relationships of stakeholders, aligning technology uses with divergent objectives of
knowledge sharing, as well as coordinating different distributions of decision-making power and
accountability.
To tackle these issues, in this dissertation I develop an understanding of the co-evolution of governance,
organizational form of e-government collaboration through the mediation of social media. Here I define
governance as the attempts to address the issue of coordination, and organizational form as the structural
features of the e-government collaboration. And I define social media as the Internet-based collaborative
technologies that are accessible to both government and non-government stakeholders for creating,
circulating, sharing and exchanging knowledge. My primary research inquiry is thus how do the
governance and organizational form of e-government collaboration occur through the mediation of social
media?
To pursue this line of inquiry, I further explore the relationship between social media and the governance
and organizational form of e-government collaboration. Specifically, I ask:
• How does the governance of e-government collaboration occur through the mediation of social
media?
• How does the organizational form of e-government collaboration occur through the mediation of
social media?
Conceptually I take an ensemble view to understand the relationship between social media and
organizational changes (i.e., governance and organizational form) and argue that while social media has
the potential to change social arrangements, these arrangements also influence the use of social media. In
particular, I use the technology enactment framework as a conceptual map to identify the embeddedness
of technology adoption in institutional, organizational and cognitive arrangements. Furthermore, I
complement the framework with the theory of institutional logics, technology frames of references, and
temporary organization, to operationalize the understanding of the institutional, organizational as well as
cognitive arrangements.
I choose e-government in China as the empirical setting to address the research questions for its unique
environment, including its recent strong policy push for e-government initiatives and public-private collaboration, its complex public administration environment, as well as the pervasiveness of social media
(i.e., WeChat) for work communication in both public and private spheres. Such an environment provides
a good number of e-government collaboration cases that are characterized by the heterogeneity of
stakeholders, mediation of social media, innovative administration arrangements, and that can be followed
and studied from their early stages.
The dataset for this dissertation is collected from four cases of e-government collaboration in China. To
better understand the development of e-government collaboration through the mediation of social media
over time, I conducted a longitudinal study on one of the cases, of which the communication between the
stakeholders is primarily mediated through the Chinese social media WeChat. For data collection, I used
qualitative methods including interviews, participant observations, as well as document analysis.
For the first research question, the findings indicate the key dimensions in the governance of e-government
collaboration center around the distribution of decision-making power and accountability between
government and non-government stakeholders. And social media, as a knowledge-sharing platform, is
crucial for achieving balances as such in an undefined collaboration, as it provides ambiguity between
stakeholders’ interests and needs, while still allowing stakeholders to develop a sense of consensus and
informedness.
For the second research question, the findings indicate that e-government collaboration can be organized
differently through the mediation of social media. Nevertheless, a long-term examination shows the
organizational form of e-government collaboration has to accord with the institutional logics at play. The
form changes as the dynamics of institutional logics change. During the transition of these organizational
settlements, social media plays an important role as a sandbox for experimenting with configurations of
organizational structures, as well as a repository for shared knowledge and experiences.
This dissertation makes three central contributions: First, it contributes to the conceptualization of
governance in the era of e-government by highlighting the role of social media and its enactment in the
occurrence of governance, and proposing an empirically driven typology of adaptive governance. Second,
it contributes to the understanding of the organizational form of e-government collaboration by identifying
the social media mediated hybridization process, and the characteristics of a social media enabled
organizational form. Third, the findings extend the understanding of social media adoption in the context
of e-government collaboration by providing a longitudinal account of social media enactment, and insights
in the relationship between social media and government transformation