collaboration, and the interaction among the original stakeholders has also changed. Tensions started to emerge around the distribution of decision-making authorities, ways of interaction, and ideas of ownership.
4.4.2.4 Case 4 Observe Network
The Observe project is a series of network-based workshops initiated in 2015, in response to the growing need to understand the application of advanced technologies among all-levels of government across the country. The main goals of these workshops were to evaluate the implemented advanced technologies in public services, as well as understanding the potential of upcoming advanced technologies in public services. The network consists of government, university, and NGO actors across the country. The Observe project broadens the network of participants through both online (i.e., WeChat group) and offline participation in discussions, providing opportunities for governments to evaluate and control implemented IT projects and acquire new knowledge and potential human resources from the network of participants.
The workshops started with a close collaboration between Zhaoqing Municipality in Guangdong Province and Fudan University in Shanghai, and then moved on to other regions and a broad network-based collaboration. By 2017, the “observe” workshop had taken place in 7 municipalities (i.e., Zhaoqing, Nanhai, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guizhou, Chongqing, Yuxi) in China. Sometimes the local government proposed to host the workshop with a relevant topic in regard to technology implementation in government for discussion. Sometimes the discussion themes were chosen based on the needs of both government and non-government stakeholders. The topics could range from big data, open government data, to smart cities, and mobile services. Once the network agreed on the topic, the workshop took place in the hosting city.
At the workshop, the hosting municipality gave a full introduction to local e-government initiatives and addressed plans for next steps. The participants then gave feedback in regard to these projects. Interaction between participants is further supported by open online chat groups, which enable new participants to ask questions and give feedback on the implementation of IT-related public projects.
In case 4, the collaboration among stakeholders was characterized by multiple decision-making authorities among a network of governments, companies and universities and NGOs. The stakeholders also share knowledge and resources on a voluntary basis. Although there is collaboration behind “observe”, there are also concerns around the sustainability of the self-governing network.
4.5.1 Interviews
In conducting the four case studies, I have used both semi-structured and unstructured interviews as my primary research methods for data collection. All interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese, and later on transcribed and translated to English.
Semi-structured interview is defined as “an interview with the purpose of obtaining descriptions of the life world of the interviewee in order to interpret the meaning of described phenomena” (Kvale and Brinkmann, 2009, p. 3). I use semi-structured interviews for uncovering government and non-government stakeholders’
experiences of developing e-government projects in all of the four cases.
I prepared the interviews with a series of open-ended questions framed around the collaboration and coordination experiences, the responsibility of each stakeholder in their own organization as well as in the collaboration, and the IT capacity of the stakeholder. Examples of the questions include: How do you experience the ownership of this project? Were there any conflicts? How did you experience these conflicts and deal with them? The semi-structured interviews were carried out with the key stakeholders of each case. Table 6 presents an overview of the interview data sources. An example of the interview guide can be found in the Appendix 1.
The semi-structured interviews in the four cases were conducted face-to-face in the informants’ work settings, often after a tour of their work place, and an introduction to the relevant departments and staff.
These work place tours and introductions helped me to establish a better understanding of the environment where the informants’ work takes place, and contextualize why they make sense of production process of digital public services in one way or another. The interviews were then conducted in a formal meeting room with the project team members. Moreover, I have also interviewed the key informants multiple times over the course of the fieldwork (for instance in case 3, where I have followed the case for three years), to follow up on the changes in the way they view the processes they are in, and their reflections of what has happened previously.
In addition, I also conducted unstructured interviews with the informants in case 3 and case 4. Unstructured interviews are conversations that appear to be “naturally occurring conversation”, yet in which “the researcher still has particular questions or directions of inquiry in mind” (Davies, 2008, p. 71). These unstructured interviews emerged as I conducted participant observation, which I will elaborate in detail in the following section. These unstructured interviews appeared when I found my informants engaging in unexpected practices, as a natural conversation to inquire about the informant’s rationale behind certain practices.
As Brinkmann pointed out, “‘meanings’ that qualitative interviewers are commonly looking for are often
in this sense allows me to capture and make sense of the changes and contradictions in the meaning informants assign to organizing processes as the project develops.
Table 6. Overview of data sources - semi-structured interviews
Case Informant Organizational Affiliation Position Interview N
1 – Lu’an Government 1 Lu'an Municipality E-government Office
Vice Director 1
Government 2 Lu'an Municipality Internet Propaganda Office
Vice Director 1
Government 3 Jin’an District
Organization department
Department head
1
Government 4 Jin’an District
Informatization Office
Vice Director 1
Non-government 1 Longsun Project manager 1
Non-government 2 Lu’wang Forum CEO 1
2 – Shanghai WeChat Service
Government 1 Internet Propaganda Office, Shanghai Police Department
Vice Director 1
Government 2 Employee
Government 3 Employee
Government 4 Technology Service Centre, Shanghai Meteorological Bureau
Vice Director 1
Government 5 Employee
Government 6 Employee
Government 7 Shanghai Release, Shanghai Municipal Government
Director 1
Government 8 Employee
Non-government 1 eGov Media Cooperation Office, Tencent Dashen
Chief eGov Media Cooperation Officer
1
3 – SODA Government 1 Shanghai Municipal Commission of Economy and Informatization (SMCEI)
Information Chief
2
Non-government 1 China Industrial Design Institute (CIDI) Shanghai
Vice-CEO 2
Non-government 2 Kesci CEO 2
Case Informant Organizational Affiliation Position Interview N Non-government 4 China Industrial Design
Institute (CIDI) Shanghai
Secretary 1
Non-government 5 Enerlong CEO 1
Non-government 6 021 Incubator CEO 1
Non-government 7 Shanghai Jiaotong University
Lab member 1
Non-government 8 Fudan University Professor 3 Non-government 9 Fudan University Lab member 1 Non-government
10
Open Data Taiwan Ambassador 1
4 – Observe Government 1 Technology Service Centre Shanghai Meteorological Bureau
Director 1
Non-government 1 Fudan University Professor 1 Non-government 2 Opendatachina.com Director 1
Non-government 3 Enerlong CEO 1
Non-government 4 Taiwan Open Data Activist 1
Total 37
4.5.2 Participant Observation
I also chose participant observation as one of my primary methods in case 3 and 4. Participant observation refers to the “long-term personal involvement with those being studied, including participation in their lives to the extent that the researcher comes to understand the culture as an insider” (Davies, 2008, p. 71).
In an organizational context, participant observation helps to reveal contextualized and otherwise inaccessible data to understand the tacit knowledge shared in organizations (Locke, 2011). In particular, recognizing the importance of ICT in modern organizations, I also engage with a “symmetric” observation, paying attention to both “the human and non-human agents involved in an activity” (Czarniawska-Joerges, 2007, p. 8), that is to say, to observe both the social and the technical elements in the organization of e-government projects. The observations resulted in field notes (Emerson et al., 2011; Locke, 2011), which served as the basis of data analysis at a later stage.
In case 3, I initially participated in the first year of SODA as a “student help”, which allowed me to attend
member, I have realized the importance of the use of WeChat groups in holding together the stakeholders behind the collaboration.
During this period, I have also developed my key informants, the organizers in charge of core operations, who are simply more willing to take the time to describe and explain their experiences. Having these key informants was critical for the development of my understanding, as it was difficult for me as one person to study an organizational phenomenon like SODA which has multiple online and offline presences simultaneously. In the subsequent years of fieldwork, I have been involved in associated events of SODA, invited into different open data community gatherings, and joined different WeChat groups, many of which are based on the invitation of these informants. My role has also shifted between ‘expert’, ‘community supporter’ and even local guide for the international stakeholders, each of them giving me a different angle to understand how a stakeholder, or an organizer experiences the collaboration behind SODA.
In case 4, I participated in two “observe” workshops (i.e., in Guizhou Province and Shanghai) as a community member. As some community members are also organizers of SODA or informants interviewed for the WeChat public service provision platform, participating in these workshops allowed me to conduct more of the unstructured interviews with the informants I came across before. It also allowed me to observe how the interactions took place in a WeChat group and how they differentiate from the interactions taking place offline among the network members, especially how people may be aware of different crowds and their distinctive interests, and behave in different ways.
4.5.3 Document Analysis
In addition, I have also used document analysis as a complementary data collection method. Document analysis refers to “a systematic procedure for reviewing or evaluating documents – both printed and electronic (computer-based and Internet-transmitted) materials” (Bowen, 2009, p. 27). By “systematic procedure”, it is implied that document analysis often involves iterative processes between “skimming (superficial examination), reading (thorough examination), and interpretation” (Bowen, 2009).
On the one hand, I use document analysis as an important means of triangulation – “the combination of methodologies in the study of the same phenomenon” (Denzin, 1973, p. 291; Lincoln and Guba, 1985, p.
306), to seek convergence and divergence in-between different data sources (Bowen, 2009). On the other hand, with archival documents, document analysis also helps me to further contextualize the observation and interview data (for example, in case 1 where the project started way before my fieldwork) (Davies, 2008). With documents generated during my fieldwork, document analysis helps to construct event sequences (for example, in case 3, where the project is studied over a course of 3 years).
The collected documents in this dissertation include official government policy reports, national e-government evaluation reports, official introduction materials for different projects, presentation slides used for stakeholder meetings, and meeting minutes. The documents were partly referred by my informants
in the interviews, where I later on searched for copies, and acquired from credible sources (e.g., databases or government websites). Table 7 presents an overview of document sources.
Table 7. Overview of data sources - documents
Type Name Source
National government policy documents
Announcement of National
Comprehensive Pilot Projects on E-government
(Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People’s Republic of China, 2017)
Notice on the Development of the
“Internet Plus” program and the Development of Big Data
(The State Council of the People’s Republic of China, 2015a, 2015b)
National and regional e-government evaluation reports
National Informatization Evaluation Report
(China Internet Network Information Center, 2016a)
Statistical Report on Internet Development in China 2014-2017
(China Internet Network Information Center, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2016c, 2016b, 2017a, 2017b)
China E-government Development Index 2014-2017
(E-government Resarch Center, Chinese Academy of Government, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017)
China Open Data Index 2016-2018 (Fudan University, 2017a, 2017b 2018a) Official
introduction materials for different cases
On case 1 Lu’an Longsun government IT project catalogue On case 3 SODA Website:http://soda.shdataic.org.cn/
Slides of two public presentations for SODA 2015 and 2016
On case 4 Observe (Fudan University, 2018b; Tsinghua University, 2015)
Project evaluation reports
On case 3 SODA Open Data Shanghai service evaluation 2015-2017
SODA evaluation report 2015
Meeting minutes On case 3 SODA Minutes of one offline key stakeholder meetings of SODA 2015, and of several university lab meetings of SODA 2015 and 2016
case analysis (Eisenhardt, 1989). For the analysis of the longitudinal study, I adopted a process theorizing approach, with the aim of tracking the changes of events in descriptive narratives over time (Langley, 1999). Although the focus of the coding varies from paper to paper, the coding was based on the data sets described above. I coded the transcripts from the interviews, field notes from participant observation, and the collected documents using the software NVivo version 11.
In general, I coded my data following three steps. For the first step, I conducted open coding on the collected data, which was organized according to different research foci. At this stage the codes are constructed inductively from raw data. In paper 1 and 3, I have also captured an event-time series to document the changes over time (Pettigrew, 1985; Poole et al., 2000). These event-time series helped me to build a connection between events and the emergent analytical themes at a later stage of coding. The initial open coding results in a wide range of unstructured first-order codes that are used as the basis for future coding and analysis.
For the second step, I zoomed out of the data and turned to different sets of relevant literature. During this stage, I used analytical concepts (e.g., institutional logics, temporary organization, technological frames of references, knowledge sharing, and adaptive governance) as my interpretive device (Bowen, 2006), or sensitizing device (Klein and Myers, 1999) to abstract patterns from the first-order codes. The process of second-order cording was reconfigured throughout the data collection, iterating between empirical materials and the research literature. By repeating the cycle of coding, I was able to generate theoretically informed and empirically driven insights of the focus of each study, improving the transferability of these theoretical insights (Lincoln and Guba, 1985).
For the third step, I revisited the second-order codes and aggregated them into analytical dimensions. I then linked these dimensions to build the final theoretical insights. Examples of the code tables and detailed descriptions of coding procedures can be found in each paper.