Social Media Enactment and the Governance of E-government Collaboration

5 FINDINGS

In this dissertation, I used four papers to address the overall research question of this dissertation:

• How do the governance and organizational form of e-government collaboration occur through the mediation of social media?

In this section, I will address the overall research question by answering to the two sub research questions in the following.

• 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?

In section 5.1, I address the first sub research question by unfolding the relation between governance of e-government collaboration and enactments of social media. In section 5.2, I address the second sub research question by unfolding the relation between the organizational form of e-government collaboration and enactments of social media.

their knowledge and experiences with each other, while ensuring about the privacy of their discussions with in one chat group.

Nevertheless, as the collaboration developed and the stakeholders started to interact intensively in the daily planning and operation of SODA, the stakeholders started to identify their own roles in the collaboration.

Subsequently, stakeholders started to frame their strategy and use of social media differently in order to meet their own needs in various situations. A summary of the stakeholders’ frames of WeChat for knowledge sharing can be found in table 8.

In particular, as the government and non-government stakeholders possessed different sets of resources, the government stakeholders gradually took a steering role, and the non-government stakeholders took an operational role in the collaboration. The government and non-government stakeholders started to develop some incongruent frames on the strategy and use of WeChat, while remaining congruent on others.

Interestingly, such mix of congruent and incongruent frames of WeChat did not cause explicit conflicts and confrontations amongst the stakeholders in the collaboration of SODA. Rather, these stakeholders maintained the ambiguity of their views of WeChat in this way, which was in fact beneficial for the continuation of the collaboration. The reason, I argue is because the ambiguity of the frames around WeChat, especially the fact that the stakeholders still share similar uses of WeChat (i.e., using WeChat for task-related activities), gives a sense of consensus among the stakeholders on knowledge sharing as the fundamental value of the collaboration, ensuring the coherence of the collaboration. In the meantime, such ambiguity also leaves room for the stakeholders to develop their own strategy and use of WeChat in order to find the means (e.g., which stakeholders to include, or exclude to solve certain tasks) and ways of decision-making (e.g., whether to go upward following organizational hierarchy, or to include all the stakeholders in joint decision-making) that can meet the specific needs in various tasks.

Overall, facilitated by the ambiguity around the frames of WeChat for knowledge sharing, the government stakeholders manage to develop governance arrangements that help to deliver the open data projects in a fast and effective manner, among which I have identified three main characteristics: selective participation, ad-hoc decision-making, and role and capacity identification. In particular, these characteristics are compatible with the characteristics of adaptive governance, including “decentralized bottom-up decision-making; efforts to mobilize internal and external capabilities; participation to spot and internalize developments; and continuous adjustments to deal with uncertainty” (Janssen and van der Voort, 2016, p.

4). A summary of the relation between technological frames and the emergent governance arrangement can be found below (see table 9).

Table 8. Technological frames of WeChat for knowledge sharing (Wang, Medaglia, and Jensen, 2018) Technology-in-use Constrain knowledge sharing N/A Targeted task assignment; Triggered attending; Task division; Information protection Enable knowledge sharing Participatory task assignment Task development Task development

Technology strategy Constrain knowledge sharing N/A Effective task management Effective task management Enable knowledge sharing Connectivity; Idea mining and resource exchange Connectivity; Idea mining and resource exchange Connectivity; Idea mining and resource exchange

Nature of technology Constrain knowledge sharing Grouping Grouping; Personal addressing (“@”) Grouping

Enable knowledge sharing Grouping; Instant Messaging; File transfer and preview; Notification alert; Grouping; Instant Messaging; File transfer and preview; Notification alert; Grouping; Instant Messaging; File transfer and preview; Notification alert;

vernment dustry iversity

Table 9. Emergent governance arrangement as response to patterns of framing (in)congruence (Adapted from (Wang, Medaglia, and Jensen, 2018))

Frame Congruence

/Incongruence

Emergent Governance Strategies

Examples

Nature of technology

Overall congruence Selective

participation

Existing group members introduce new members to the group to harness the diversity of knowledge and resources;

Existing group members place new members into different groups to avoid potential conflicts of interests All the stakeholders are aware

WeChat can be used to both enable and constrain knowledge sharing

Technology strategy

Mix of congruence and incongruence Role and capability identification

Stakeholders draw on each other’s identified capacities to complete tasks at the beginning of the collaboration;

Stakeholders identify their roles as collaboration develops, and specify their needs for new capacities At the beginning of the collaboration,

all the stakeholders are motivated to adopt WeChat to enable knowledge sharing in order to improve

connectivity and share ideas;

As collaboration develops, industry and university stakeholders are motivated to adopt WeChat for constraining knowledge sharing in order to manage operational tasks.

Technology-in-use

Overall incongruence Ad hoc

decision-making

At the beginning of the collaboration, there is no pre-determined decision-maker within the network;

As collaboration develops, multiple decision-making authorities emerge Government stakeholders use

WeChat for enabling knowledge sharing to assign tasks to other stakeholders;

Industry and university stakeholders use WeChat for constraining

Another interesting finding regarding the governance arrangements of SODA that caught my attention is that while government and non-government stakeholders jointly make most of the decisions during the collaboration, there is a clear divide in the distribution of accountability between government and non-government stakeholders. The non-government stakeholders are held accountable for resource and networking related tasks, and the non-government stakeholders are held accountable for the operation of SODA (Identified in the finding of paper 2). That is to say, there is a decoupling between the distribution of decision-making power and accountability across government and non-government stakeholders.

Nevertheless, it is not clear whether this pattern is only specific to SODA, or also exists in the governance of other types of e-government collaborations. In order to answer this question, in addition to the case of SODA (i.e., case 3), I have drawn data from another three case studies (i.e., case 1, 2, and 4) on e-government collaboration to observe the distribution of decision-making power and accountability among the government and non-government stakeholders. These three cases are selected as they also carry similar characteristics of adaptive governance. I present the finding in the next section.