The influence of public management reforms in practice (Skelcher and Smith, 2015), together with the increasing need for governments to answer to disruptive technological innovation (Janssen and van der Voort, 2016), and governments’ adoption of social media for connecting with their stakeholders (Margetts and Dunleavy, 2013), have stimulated the emergence of a variety of organizational forms of e-government projects, to which the label ‘hybrid’ is often attached.
While these organizational forms have presented different options for the stakeholders of e-government
collaboration. In this section, I present the existing literature to provide two perspectives to understand the organizational form of e-government collaboration, one focusing on organizational form as institutional hybrid, one focusing on organizational form as socio-technical hybrid. In the end of this section, I identify the existing research gaps on the organizational form of e-government collaboration.
2.4.1 Organizational Form as Institutional Hybrid
Organizational form refers to “the structural features or patterns that are shared among many organizations”
(Fulk and DeSanctis, 1999, p. 5). As a result of government management reforms and changes in governance schemes, governments increasingly engage in collaboration with non-government stakeholders in producing digital public services, which have taken on different ‘hybrid’ organizational forms. These ‘hybrid’ organizational forms take on different structural features from markets, hierarchies, and networks (Powell, 1990), and range from short-term contractual agreements, such as IT outsourcing, to more voluntary long-term inter-organizational arrangements, such as public-private partnerships or strategic alliances.
More specifically, closely linked to the application of NPM-like ideas in practice, IT outsourcing refers to the contrast-based transfer of IT-related activities and tasks from government to an external private provider (Duhamel et al., 2014; Gantman, 2011; Lacity and Willcocks, 1997; Lee, 2001; Moon et al., 2016;
Ruzzier et al., 2008). Together with the emergence of NPG agenda, public-private partnerships have also flourished as an organizational form of digital public services delivery. Public-private partnerships broadly refer to “institutionalized cooperative arrangements between public-sector actors and private-sector actors”
(Greve and Hodge, 2010, p. 149), where government and non-government stakeholders share risks and resources in order to produce value over time for the benefits of all (Bertot et al., 2013; Greve, 2015; Hodge and Greve, 2007; Hui and Hayllar, 2010; Joha and Janssen, 2010; Khan et al., 2012; Villani et al., 2017).
Similarly, organizational forms, such as strategic alliances have also emerged. Strategic alliances involve
“collaborative inter-organizational relationships involving voluntary efforts and significant resources of two or more organizations to create, and to, or maximize, their joint value” (Markus and Quang, 2011;
McMullen and Warnick, 2016; Willcocks and Choi, 1995, pp. 67–68).
While these organizational forms that suggest consistency and long-term sustainability become institutionalized in practice, studies have also reported on the difficulties for stakeholders when choosing the appropriate organizational configurations for handling the increase in organizational and technological complexities in e-government implementation (Axelsson et al., 2010; Feller et al., 2011; Heimstädt et al., 2014; Lindgren et al., 2015), and the consequential risks of project failures (Anthopoulos et al., 2016; Joha and Janssen, 2010; Langford and Roy, 2006).
emphasize that the implementation of ‘advanced’ technologies in public services result in turbulent and unpredictable collaboration dynamics that are characterized by an extensive and expansive network of stakeholders (Axelsson et al., 2010; Feller et al., 2011), uncertainty and constant revision of project goals (Lindgren et al., 2015), as well as emergent roles and relationships among the stakeholders (Cordella and Hesse, 2015; Heimstädt et al., 2014; Lindgren et al., 2015). These studies converge with research work in the field of information systems on the organizing of digital innovation (Afuah and Tucci, 2012; Nambisan et al., 2017), and start to contour forms of highly flexible and fluid organizing that is based on relentlessly changing templates, quick improvisations and ad hoc responses. Nevertheless, the organizational processes that give rise to these emergent organizational forms are still not sufficiently understood among e-government research.
By contrast, research from organizational science, public administration, and project management have looked more in-depth into the organizational processes that are apt to handle complexities and environmental turbulence (Gulati and Puranam, 2009; Matinheikki et al., 2018; Schildt and Perkmann, 2017; Schreyögg and Sydow, 2010; Skelcher and Smith, 2015). These studies have revealed that to understand changes in organizational form, a better understanding of the relationship between organizations and institutions is needed. This stream of research suggests situating the discussion of organizational form among broader institutional demands, and stresses organizational form as “an archetypical configuration of structures and practices given coherence by underlying values regarded as appropriate within an institutional context” (Greenwood and Suddaby, 2006, p. 30). In this sense, organizational forms can be understood as a series of organizational settlements that result from turbulent institutional dynamics, thus highly flexible and fluid (Schildt and Perkmann, 2017).
Furthermore, in consistent with the call for new organizational form to answer to disruptive technology innovation in the conception of adaptive governance (Janssen and van der Voort, 2016), research from organizational science also suggests that organizing should strike a balance between stability and adaptiveness (Gulati et al., 2012; Gulati and Puranam, 2009; Schreyögg and Sydow, 2010). This implies a need to better understand not only the consistent, but also inconsistent and contradictory organizational processes, when investigated the organizing processes that give rise to organizational form.
While what we have seen advocates for more integrated institutional analysis on government transformation among the e-government literature in the recent years (Luna-Reyes and Gil-Garcia, 2011, 2014), the question of how organizational forms of e-government collaboration occur and develop to strike the balance between stability and adaptiveness still remains unanswered, and needs to be better understood empirically.
In addition, as mentioned above, the discussion of organizational form is further complicated in the digital age, as organizational communication is increasingly mediated by social media, which I will elaborate on next.
2.4.2 Organizational Form as Socio-technical Hybrid
Studies in information systems and organizational science have long suggested the socio-technical nature of organizational form (Child and McGrath, 2001; Faraj et al., 2011; Foster and Flynn, 1984; Fulk and DeSanctis, 1999), as communication – “the connective mechanism that enables parts of the organization to coordinate with one another and with other organizations” (Fulk and DeSanctis, 1999, p. 5), becomes increasingly mediated by ICTs. Since the advent of social media, social media have arguably become the new ‘hybrid’ elements in all organizations, and have led to a series of research on the potential impacts on transforming intra- and inter-organizational collaboration and coordination (Aral et al., 2013; Kapoor et al., 2017; Leonardi et al., 2013; Leonardi and Vaast, 2017).
As mentioned above, social media have gained a lot of attention among the e-government research (e.g., Bertot et al., 2010; Mergel, 2013; Mergel and Bretschneider, 2013). While the majority of the studies have focused on how social media are implemented (Mergel and Bretschneider, 2013), to what extent social media are helpful for strengthening existing government capabilities and how they offer new government capabilities (Krishnamurthy, 2015; Linders, 2012), only a few have focused on how the form of the collaboration is being reconfigured (Meijer and Torenvlied, 2016).
Although the majority of these e-government studies do not focus directly on social media and changes in the organizational form of e-government collaboration, they do seem to imply a decentralizing effect of social media use, (e.g., Chun et al., 2010), which may undermine the foundation of government as a bureaucratic organization (Powell, 1990). This voice echoes the core argument for public organizations to be modernized to the post-bureaucratic and networked organization (Brafman and Beckstrom, 2006;
Shirky, 2008), in order to adapt to the dynamic and complex nature of information society (Meijer, 2008;
Osborne and Plastrik, 1997).
Nevertheless, in a more recent examination of Dutch police departments’ use of Twitter, Meijer and Torenvlied (2016) found the organization of police social media communication is hybrid rather than radically different from the bureaucratical model. They empahsise that the hybrid orgnaization emerges due to conflicting institutional demands that are at play (Pache and Santos, 2012). This finding suggests a link to other institutional demands that are at play and a reconfirmation of the Luna-Reyes and Gil-Garcia (2014)’s appeal to integrate the anlaysis of technology, organization and institution in order to attain a better understanding of the link between ICT and transformative change in the public sector. That is to say, in order to understand the link between social media and the changes in organizational form, one needs to embed the discussion of social media and organizational form in a broader institutional context.
The institutional focus can also provide an opportunity to solve the skeptics in e-government studies about
over a long period of time, IT will eventually be predetermined, institutionalized and routinized by government, so the transformation may be limited.
The literature review on organizational form suggests that among the current e-government literature, it is still not clear whether or not technology implementation in public services would trigger new organization form under different institutional demands, and whether or not communication technology such as social media can further facilitate the transformation over time. To understand the impacts of e-government on government transformation, I need to look in-depth into the interplay between institutional demands, organizational arrangements, and communication technologies (e.g., social media), hence the sub research question 2:
How does the organizational form of e-government collaboration occur through the mediation of social media?
In the next section, I summarize the literature review and map out the research gaps for this dissertation.