media, once the organizational structure and practices becomes settled, hence the combination of institutional logics stabilized, social media may no longer be of use for the collaboration as a primary communication platform.
In sum, the findings show in a highly turbulent environment where the range and dynamics of stakeholders change frequently, the organizational form of e-government collaboration can be a series of organizational settlements that are largely different from each other. The findings indicate the changes in organizational form are partly driven by the changing dynamics of the institutional logics at play, and the settlements are the results of a hybridization process of the institutional logics. In particular, the findings point to the two roles of social media in the occurrence of the organizational form, as a virtual sandbox for the stakeholders to experiment with different organizational structures, and a repository of knowledge and experiences that reproduce the temporary combinations of institutional logics.
identification, that help the stakeholders to rapidly coordinate resources and knowledge for the realization of e-government collaboration. A detailed examination of the decision-making in the collaboration reveals a decoupling between the distribution of decision-making power and accountability across the government and non-government stakeholders, which helps the collaboration to remain stable while responding fast to the changes in the collaboration environment.
While social media and its enactment for knowledge sharing makes possible the realization of e-government collaboration for digital public service that is not previously known to the e-government stakeholders, the resulted changes in the range and dynamics of stakeholders also bring in conflicting interests that need to be addressed. The findings of this dissertation suggest there are competing institutional logics at play in e-government collaboration that features stakeholders of heterogeneous backgrounds, presenting conflicting demands that have to be dealt with in order to sustain the collaboration.
The findings suggest the stakeholders can in fact accommodate these conflicts by changing the organizational form of e-government collaboration through a three-step hybridization process (i.e., evaluation of existent demands, coping, and temporary combination of demands) that combined different demands of various institutional logics.
In particular, social media plays an important role by providing a virtual sandbox for the stakeholders to experiment with different combinations of institutional demands. In doing so, the stakeholders reconfigure the features of social media, thus enacts social media differently. In the meantime, the stakeholders also inscribe their temporary combination of institutional demands into these reconfigurations of social media, allowing for the reproduction of the elements of the competing institutional logics. In addition, social media also documents the stakeholders’ shared knowledge and experiences in negotiating these competing institutional logics, which reenacts the temporary combination of institutional logics, and might lead to institutional change over time. The findings indicate, social media as a virtual sandbox and a repository for shared knowledge and experiences, allows for the emergence of three coping approaches, that is, prototyping, selective coupling and mitigating internal tensions.
Based on the findings, I present a figure to illustrate the occurrence of the governance and organizational form of e-government collaboration through the mediation of social media in a hypothetical situation (See figure 8). In the figure, Phase 1, 2, 3, indicate the different phases of the development of e-government collaboration. Logic A, B, C and the recycle arrows represent the competing institutional logics and their dynamics in the collaboration. Logic D represents an emergent new institutional logic that resulted from the combination of the existing logics.
Figure 8. Illustration of the occurrence of the governance and organizational form of e-government collaboration through the mediation of social media
The figure illustrates that in implementing a ‘new’ digital public service that is not previously familiar to the government stakeholders and requires the participation of non-government stakeholders, how social media, governance and organizational form are coordinated in order to realize the e-government collaboration among various organizational and institutional arrangements. As the organizational and institutional arrangements of e-government collaboration develop, the governance and organizational form of e-government collaboration changes in order to adapt to the development of organizational and institutional arrangements at different phases of the collaboration. Social media and its enactment also play different roles as the collaboration becomes adaptive. While social media play a critical role in providing infrastructures for knowledge sharing in collaboration, mediating opposing needs of knowledge sharing, and accommodating the competing institutional logics at the beginning of the collaboration. As the
Overall, in section 5, I have showed how the findings of this dissertation answer to the research question:
how do the governance and organizational form of e-government collaboration occur through the mediation of social media. In the next section, I present how these findings add to the existing e-government literature in the field of information systems and public administration, as well as the implications of these findings for practice. In addition, I also identify the limitations of this study and the avenues for future research.
6 DISCUSSION
In this section, I discuss the findings of this study in relation to the existing e-government literature in the field of information systems and public administration, and show how the findings contribute to the existing literature on the understanding of governance, organizational form and social media in the context of e-government collaboration. I also present the implications of the findings for practice. At the end of this section, I present the limitations of this dissertation and highlight the avenues for future research.