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This paper aims to examine the interaction between gatekeeping and trust in a public sector organization, where employees at lower hierarchical levels are expected to autonomously translate and transform directives into public services. This requires them to have access to operational steering information, i.e. information about directives and how to interpret and apply them. This study focuses on how gatekeeping structures regulate flows of operational steering information and how the gatekeeping structures affect the development of trust.

The research design is qualitative. The data material consisted of semi-structured interviews with 26 employees in home care and schools and of eight complementary nonparticipant observations. Thematic analysis revealed the presence of static and dynamic gatekeeping structures, which are characterized by fixed and variable arrangements of information sources and channels, respectively.

In static gatekeeping structures, managers or domain experts typically act as gatekeepers, and employees also perform gatekeeping activities collectively. Gatekeeping structures allow employees to switch between acting as gatekeepers and being gated, depending on the situation. The results show that gatekeeping structures for intermediation of operational steering information may support or impede employees' work, thus affecting their trust in their peers and their work organization.

Although the present study included both interviews and observations, these primarily occurred within scheduled and prearranged activities rather than capturing the nuances of the typical daily work of teachers and home care employees. As a result, certain perspectives may have been unintentionally omitted.

The participants were recruited through the City of Oslo contact people, which may have impacted their status or perception in some way. Moreover, the study was conducted in the City of Oslo, a specific organization with its own unique set of values, norms and processes. The trust-based management in the City of Oslo is likely not representative of all public sector organizations.

This study contributes conceptually by introducing gatekeeping structures and operational steering information and empirically by providing evidence of their relationship to trust development in public service delivery. Thus, it contributes to the research fields of information management and public administration.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the appropriateness of gatekeeping theory, particularly its recent elaboration in journalism and communication studies for the investigation of information flows in academic libraries.

This paper uses the methods of conceptual analysis and thought experiment.

This paper finds that current elaborations of gatekeeping theory are useful for modeling library information flows, particularly identifying and evaluating influences on those flows. It is able to reframe intransigent issues around library neutrality and open access so that more nuanced approaches can be constructed.

Gatekeeping theory as elaborated by Shoemaker and Vos for journalism and communication studies, while occasionally referenced the library and information science (LIS) literature, has not been previously evaluated as a framework for library information flows. This is the first paper to assess the potential of aspects of the theory such as levels of analysis and multiplicity of channels to reframe issues in LIS.

Assesses the degree of self‐reported implementation of gatekeeping in clinical practice, and gains insight into primary care physicians’ attitudes toward gatekeeping and their perceptions of necessary conditions for implementation of gatekeeping in daily practice. A self‐administered questionnaire was mailed to a national sample of 800 primary care physicians in Israel, with a response rate of 86 per cent. Multivariate analysis indicated that sick fund affiliation was the main predictor of self‐reported implementation of gatekeeping, while specialty training predicted primary care physicians’ attitude toward this role. Close communication with specialists, continuous medical education, and management support of physician decisions were identified by respondents as being important conditions for gatekeeping. Discusses strategies to gain the cooperation of primary care physicians, which is necessary for implementing an effective gatekeeping system.

This study aims to elaborate the picture of the relationships between information and power by examining how expert power appears in the characterizations of gatekeeping presented in the research literature.

This study uses conceptual analysis for examining how expert power is constitutive of the construct of gatekeeper and how people subject to the influence of gatekeeping trust or challenge the expert power attributed to gatekeepers. The study draws on the analysis of 40 key studies on the above issues.

Researchers have mainly constructed the gatekeepers' expert power in terms of superior knowledge and skills applicable to a specific domain, coupled with an ability to control or facilitate access to information. The gatekeeper's expert power has been approached as a contextual factor that facilitates rather than controls access to information. The power relationships between the gatekeepers and those subject to gatekeeping vary contextually, depending on the extent to which the latter have access to alternative sources of information. The findings highlight the need to elaborate the construct of gatekeeping by rethinking its relevance in the networked information environments where the traditional picture of gatekeepers controlling access to information sources is eroding.

As the study focuses on how expert power figures in gatekeeping, no attention is devoted to the role of social power of other types, for example, reward power and referent power.

The study pioneers by providing an in-depth analysis of the nature of expert power as a constituent of gatekeeping.

The purpose of this study is to investigate why and how gatekeepers on social networking sites (SNS) create what types of information benefits for gated, vulnerable, pregnant women in the rural United States.

This qualitative study adopts “network gatekeeping” as a theoretical lens to implement a combination of deductive and inductive qualitative approaches for analyzing in-depth interviews with members and administrators of a Vaginal Birth After Cesarean (VBAC) Group on Facebook with a membership of over 500 pregnant women in rural Appalachia in the United States.

The VBAC group administrators' (a) vision of transforming the existing doctor-centric birth culture to a more mother-centric birth culture in the rural United States, (b) expertise and experience in healthcare and (c) valuing scientific, evidence-based information lead to recurring, authoritative but evolving manifestations of combinations of nine network gatekeeping mechanisms. Implementations of nine network gatekeeping mechanisms (i.e. localization, infrastructure, cost effect, channeling, censorship, regulation, editorial, user-interaction and value adding mechanisms) help VBAC group administrators control interactions and information on the group, thereby creating 16 information benefits for the gated, vulnerable women before, during and after pregnancy.

This sociological study of network gatekeeping posits and proves an “information value chain” (i.e. Why to create information benefits? – How to create information benefits? – What types of information benefits?) for vulnerable, pregnant women on Facebook. Rarely any study shows the role of network gatekeeping mechanisms in implementing an information value chain.

The purpose of this paper is to explore, describe and categorise practices of managing product returns empirically in internet retailing.

A multiple case study was conducted involving 12 e-commerce firms and 4 logistics service providers. An integrative data collection approach of semi-structured interviews, documentation and observations was used to gain comprehensive managerial and operational descriptions of returns management (RM) processes.

The findings show inconsistent RM processes, with a plethora of practices implemented and organised differently across firms. RM processes are ambiguous; their design is a result of incremental changes over time, lacking strategy and goals. There is a mismatch between how they are described and understood in the literature and how they are actually used. Practices in gatekeeping, avoidance and reverse logistics are defined and categorised. These serve as a typology of practices for managers to (re)consider, along with 15 propositions on how RM is practised.

The range of RM practices and the processes reflect a lack of scholarly attention and strategic view. Research is needed to develop clear goals on how the RM process can be better aligned with business strategies.

The typology of practices is a benchmark for internet retailers in their design of efficient RM processes.

Systematic and empirical research on RM is scarce compared to forward management. The study bridges this gap as one of the first to describe RM practices in depth, define service as a key activity, and identify a mismatch between theory and practice.

Eight college and university Webmasters in three midwestern states were interviewed to explore their communications practices and activities by applying a traditional mass media gatekeeping perspective. The results suggest that gatekeeping theory is a valuable approach for studying individuals responsible for the mediation of messages in the emerging online media. Webmasters’ personal characteristics and attitudes were found to influence their media content decisions, they share common values used to determine content and design, and they face a variety of organizational and related constraints, some exclusive to Web gatekeepers in an academic setting. Examples of gatekeeping activity and observations by the informants are presented, and suggestions for future research are included.

Owing to the complexity of the task and the risks inherent in it, the effectiveness of any organizational buying decision largely depends on the information available for the decision‐makers’ use. Within any typical organization, flow of the information needed in the decision‐making process is influenced by the gatekeepers – the people who link the organization with the outside environment. However, despite the important role played by these people, not much is known about their behavior. This research makes an attempt to study gatekeeping behavior and examine factors which may influence this behavior.

For many years the excellence theory (Grunig, 1992), with its ideal of two-way symmetrical communication, has been the dominant normative framework in public relations (PR). From an affordance perspective, social media seem to side perfectly with this promise of a more balanced power relation between participants in the communication loop. The purpose of this paper is to see if this promise was realized in the context of an internal communication practitioner’s social software use.

The authors used a critical case approach for the organizational ethnography. Therefore, the authors selected an IT company where the formal position of internal communication was being created. In this environment, the authors considered it “least likely” to find the unidirectional model of “push communication.” The authors used the network gatekeeping theory (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008) to study technology usage patterns in the organization.

The analysis indicates that the internal communicator uses social software to interact with other employees. The authors additionally found these tools to affect the gatekeeping role of internal communication, altering the position’s ideological focus through its ability to shape the technological environment.

On a theoretical level, the network gatekeeping theory proved to be useful to study power relations inside organizations. On a practical level, the authors found themselves combining different data sources to grasp the complexity of organizational communication practices.

This research questions the widespread assumption that adoption of social software leads to excellence in PR. Additionally, the use of ethnographic methods in PR has been rare.

Small and medium-sized exporters (SMEs) are driven to develop a network entry strategy to tap into a new foreign market. The purpose of this paper is to draw on the network perspective to evaluate how a network gatekeeper facilitates a foreign SME exporter’s entry into local business networks in China.

The single case study method was adopted. The Ule New Zealand Mall, an online shopping platform that sells New Zealand products in China, was selected in this case study. The authors applied the critical incident technique to evaluate the position of New Zealand Post (as a home country-based network gatekeeper), the roles within the position, and the key outcome of the network gatekeeping.

The study discovers two key roles of network gatekeepers: bridging the gap in trust between outsider networks and insider networks; and reducing the costs of experiential learning for SME exporters. Finally, this study concludes that the “brokered insidership” position acquired by SME exporters is the key outcome of network gatekeeping in foreign market entry.

This study advances the understanding of theories of structural holes, business network and gatekeeping. The authors articulate the critical position assumed by a network gatekeeper in bridging two otherwise disconnected business networks, and their key roles in networking. The study also proposes a new network concept – “brokered insidership”.