Social media for openness and accountability in the public sector: Cases in the Greek context

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2014.11.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Conceptualises social media use for openness and accountability

  • Shows the use of social media drawing on the “affordances” lens

  • Affordances can orchestrate design strategies for social media in e-government.

  • Affordances are building blocks of national policy for openness and accountability.

  • Discusses the implications of the affordances lens for policy and practise

Abstract

This paper explores the use of government social media for openness and accountability. The extant literature has highlighted the benefits of social media use in this context to enhance citizen participation and engagement in decision-making and policy development, facilitate openness and transparency efforts, and reduce corruption. Yet, there are limited studies that discuss those properties of social media that can afford openness and accountability, and their implications for policy and practise. To address these gaps, a study is conducted in the Greek context using interviews with top managers, policy makers, and relevant stakeholders across five initiatives. We discuss distinct affordances for openness and accountability, and propose their inclusion as building blocks of the national ICT policy for openness and accountability. Finally, we provide the implications of the affordances lens for policy and practise, the limitations of the study and future research avenues.

Introduction

Social media “employ mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content” (Kietzmann et al., 2012). The particular attribute of social media which sets it apart from other existing forms of communication is its reliance on user-generated content, i.e. the content created and shared by end-users or the general public in real time using computers and mobile devices, allowing, thereby, ‘many-to-many’ communication (ibid). A survey by McKinsey suggests that 65% of companies are using Web 2.0 technologies (Bughin et al., 2010), whereas according to Forrester Research, the corporate spending on social media by the end of 2013 will reach $4.6 billion (Young et al., 2008).

Research has illustrated the benefits of social media by the government for openness and transparency (Bertot, Jaeger and Grimes, 2010, Bertot, Jaeger and Hansen, 2012, Bonson et al., 2012, Shuler et al., 2010) in the public sector when focusing on local government and municipalities (Bonson et al., 2012), citizen empowerment (Linders, 2012) and interaction with government (Leston-Bandeira & Bender, 2013), for crisis situations (Kavanaugh et al., 2012), and their use in the 2012 U.S. presidential elections (Hong & Nadler, 2012). However, research on the impact of social computing on public sector is still tentative and exploratory (Ala-Mutka et al., 2013). Social media can support, according to Ellison & Hardey (2013), but not replace fixed but less agile institutions of representative democracy. In particular, a review of recent research—cited as well in the Electronic-Government Reference Library (EGRL) (EGRL, 2014—see Appendix, Tables 1A, 2A, and 3A) and recent work on the material aspects of social media (e.g. Leonardi et al., 2013, Treem and Leonardi, 2012) revealed that there is a need for a better understanding of a. properties of social media that afford openness and accountability; b. how these properties can be included in design strategies for social media applications to facilitate openness and accountability in governance; and c. the implications of these design strategies for the national policy and practise. In particular, there has not been relatively little research on the material properties of social media that grant different users with different possibilities of action, and how these properties facilitate openness and accountability in governance. To address this gap we follow the endorsement by Leonardi et al. (2013) that “a theoretically motivated investigation of social media technologies in the workplace is now an imperative for the fields of communication, management, and information systems” (p. 16) and in our case, governance, and hence our research questions are the following: which are the properties of social media that afford openness and accountability? Could these properties be conceptualised as building blocks of social media for openness and accountability? Could these properties be strategically designed in social media for openness and accountability?

To answer these questions our research follows the qualitative case study strategy in the Greek context, using semi-structured interviews with executives, public policy makers, and relevant stakeholders in both private (service providers) and public organisations across five initiatives. We draw from the literature on affordances (Barley et al., 2012, Leonardi, 2011) and we discuss different affordances of social media for openness and accountability. We conceptualise these affordances as the building blocks of social media based on the framework by Kietzmann et al., 2011, Kietzmann et al., 2012—that defines social media as a honeycomb of seven interacting elements. Finally, we discuss the implications of these affordances for policy and practise and we propose their inclusion as building blocks of the national ICT policy for openness and accountability.

The paper is structured as follows: after a brief review of the literature on social media for openness and accountability (Section 2), we discuss affordances (Sections 3) as an alternative lens to illustrate those “sociomaterial” properties of social media that facilitate openness and accountability. After presenting the methodology (Section 4), we illustrate this argument through a case study in Greece based on five initiatives (Section 5). We then discuss the findings in light of the extant literature and illustrate the implications for policy and practise (Section 6). The paper concludes (Section 7) by highlighting its contribution to literature and suggesting future research avenues.

Section snippets

Social media for openness and accountability

In this section we briefly review the extant literature on social media use for openness and accountability. We include (i) a review of the literature in the EGRL (EGRL, 2014), and (ii) review of the literature on ‘affordances’, which is the theoretical lens of this study.

The EGRL was created in 2005 and included the peer-reviewed, English language literature of the EGR domain. Since 2005, it is being recorded and semi-annually updated (Scholl, 2009, Scholl, 2010, Scholl and Dwivendi, 2014).

Affordances and social media

Orlikowski (2007), being unsatisfied with the way materiality is dealt with in studies of organisation and technology, have argued that there is a need to place materiality as an important constituent of everyday life (Latour, 2005, Leonardi and Barley, 2008, Leonardi et al., 2013). Therefore, it is important to place focus on the role of the materiality of technology and how it becomes imbricated in the process of organising and social practise in general (Leonardi, 2011, Leonardi et al., 2013

Research context

Greece was chosen as the research context of this study. Literature focusing on openness and accountability in the Greek context (Avgerou, 2002, Makrydimitris and Michalopoulos.,, 2000, Prasopoulou, 2011, Sotiropoulos, 1989) in particular observes that in Greece there is a limited presence of articulated policy objectives and standardised administrative and governance routines, which have transformed the public administration and policy into highly complex and opaque organisations that provide

Findings: the properties of social media that afford openness and accountability

This section reports on the results from the interviews with top managers, policy makers, and teams. Based on the findings from the interviews across the five vignettes, we discuss the distinct affordances of social media for openness and accountability (Table 2). In the following subsections, we describe these affordances and provide illustrative quotes from the interviews.

Discussion

This paper set out to explore the different affordances provided by social media for openness and accountability (Bertot, Jaeger and Grimes, 2010, Bertot, Jaeger and Hansen, 2012, Bonson et al., 2012, Shuler et al., 2010). It addressed the endorsement by Criado et al. (2013) and Oliveira and Welch (2013) for more attention amongst social media technologies, tasks, and the organisational context. Furthermore, it addressed the endorsement by authors focusing on the sociomaterial properties of

Conclusion

This paper studied the use of social media for openness and accountability in the public sector, using five case vignettes in the Greek context. Our study contributes to the literature on the use of social media for openness and accountability in the public sector, discussing the affordances of social media for openness and accountability and conceptualises the affordances as building blocks of social media functionality types for openness and accountability using the model of Kietzmann et al.,

Dr. Teta Stamati obtained her degree in computer science from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She also holds an MPhil in Enterprise Modelling Techniques from University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in UK, an MBA Degree from Lancaster University Business School in UK, and a PhD from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. Currently, she is an associate in Harokopio University, Greece. She has extensive experience in top

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    Dr. Teta Stamati obtained her degree in computer science from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She also holds an MPhil in Enterprise Modelling Techniques from University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in UK, an MBA Degree from Lancaster University Business School in UK, and a PhD from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. Currently, she is an associate in Harokopio University, Greece. She has extensive experience in top management positions in leading IT companies of the Greek and European private sector.

    Dr. Thanos Papadopoulos is an Associate Professor of Information Systems and Director of the MBA at Sussex School of Business, Management, and Economics at the University of Sussex, UK. He holds a PhD from Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK. He also holds a Diploma (Equivalent to MEng) in Computer Engineering and Informatics from the School of Engineering of Patras University, Greece, and an MSc in Information Systems from the Department of Informatics of the Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece. He has been awarded the Best Paper Award in the 2007 International Conference on the Management of Healthcare & Medical Technology. His articles have been published in leading international journals such as British Journal of Management, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Journal of Operational Research Society, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, and Production Planning and Control.

    Professor Dimosthenis Anagnostopoulos is the Rector of Harokopio University of Athens, Greece and Head of the Department of Informatics and Telematics at the same University. From 2004–2009 he served as the General Secretary of Information Systems at the Greek Ministry of Finance. He is a Professor in Discrete Event Simulation at the Department of Informatics and Telematics, Harokopio University of Athens, Greece. He received the bachelor's and PhD degrees in computer science from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications at the University of Athens. He has published more than 100 papers in international journals and conferences. His research interests include discrete event simulation, faster-than-real-time simulation, and modelling and simulation of distributed Information Systems. He has actively participated in numerous projects related to simulation, e-government, and Information Systems.

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