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When organizations engage in misconduct, social control agents play a crucial role in sanctioning them to show the enforcement of societal norms and reduce the risk of future deviance. We study the interaction between the government and the media, two key social control agents, in the evaluation organizational misconduct. While past work has focused on the influence of the media on the government, we theorize the influence of the government on the media. The government is a social control agent with supreme formal authority to punish misconduct, and thus its actions are of particular interest to the media as they form evaluations of misbehaving organizations. However, the government, tied by conflicting demands, sometimes turns a blind eye to misconduct and supports misbehaving organizations for the greater societal good, instead of punishing them. How is the media’s perception of misbehaving organizations affected by such government actions? We explore this question by looking at the case of the 2008 government bailout of investment banks in the United States, after those were caught red-handed for their involvement in the sub-prime financial crisis. Carrying out a content analysis of newspaper reporting (2007–2011), we show that the negative perception of investment banks and their misconduct is attenuated when they receive government support. Our work contributes to the emerging literature on the social construction of organizational misconduct and illuminates the interaction between government and media in the evaluation of behavior as organizational misconduct.

One of the most important challenges of our society is to cope with the transition of our society into a more and more digital one. Thus, the political and governmental system has to face and adapt to those transitions as well. This chapter focuses on the social media communication of the British, German and French national governments. The goal of this chapter is to compare the social media communication of these three countries in 2015 within each other as well as to draw a comparison between the results of two predecessor studies in 2011 and 2014. A new special focus of this chapter will be on the interactive discourse between society/citizens and governments.

Public sector absorbs a sizeable part of each country’s GDP. Therefore, public organisations are not performing very well at the economic level of responsibility. Consequently, we argue that in order to build better and more responsible public organisations we need to improve their economic responsibility. This chapter presents a prospective action of social media for business to intervene in public administration reform. We envision a possible course of action that may introduce CSR in the public sector thanks to social media collective action.

The framework of this study will make a reference to the theory of socio-technological media de Kerckhove and Pierre Lévy, and on a survey of the literature of citizen activism through social media to answer the question: new media, new message?

It is a new perspective action of social media for business-government relations. We identify a possible theory that leverages the ‘koinè’ of multinational brands to address government effectiveness. The names of multinational companies are the same all over the world, like the ‘Koine’ Greek, and are now a common element in all languages of the world. Citizens and consumers pay a great deal of attention to brands. Multinationals spend millions of dollars every year in public relations (PR) and marketing precisely in order to manage their reputations and images and respond to the requests that consumers have of big corporations. The greatest threat to the reputation of a company or a multinational brand comes, in fact, via the Internet, which has become the most powerful weapon in the hands of interest groups. The object of this research is to explore whether stakeholders can join forces with corporations and use global media to monitor governments in the same way.

The citizens of governments and the customers of global corporations – in different countries in the world – seem to be isolated islands: all endure their own battle without the possibility of drawing attention from other parts of the world through social media.

The citizens can exercise pressure on the governments and public administrations the same way as what happens against the brands. It behoves us to ensure responsible behaviour from all. We propose an extension of the use of social media to monitor behaviour of governments as effectively as they are used to monitor behaviour of the corporations.

The stakeholder approach to CSR action and reporting implies that the relevant stakeholders of the organisation be listened to, and this listening be accounted for in the CSR report. These groups are also called the ‘publics’ of the organisation. We contend that the stakeholder approach might be misused and end up in collusion with sections of the publics involved.

The stakeholder approach leads an organisation to try to engage with the wrong counterparts. This is an over-rating of stakeholders.

Therefore, everything that is not taken into account under the headline of the stakeholder approach we call ‘stewardship for the unknown stakeholder’. The theoretical bases of this value reside in the vast literature on non-maximising, non-efficient, non-effective behaviour by firms and by the employees especially.

Thus, the first task in drawing up a CSR or sustainability report is to identify the possible unknown stakeholders; that is, those who do have a stake but don’t know they do; those who have a stake too small to care about but who are numerous.

If we complain about Apple, many in the world will join in; if we complain about the companies that manage the ‘garis’ (as the Portuguese call a garbage collector of Rio de Janeiro) nobody outside Brazil thinks it matters. But in fact, this is not true!

To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. Each local public administration will have its own problems, but all in the same way contribute to the well-being or mismanagement of a territory and its citizens. All, to some extent, ill-treated the citizens through their ineffectively.

The CSR should be for everyone and a global movement of citizens asking for responsible governments around the world could be the solution for the well-being of the individual peoples. Let the people’s rights emerge vis-à-vis perceived needs and outrage about the ineffectiveness of public administration that too often lose the name of action.

In summary, the proposal is the extension of the use of social media to monitor behaviour of governments as effectively as they are used to monitor behaviour of the corporations.

We propose a covenant between consumers/taxpayers in order to extend the CSR to governments and public administration. The citizens can exercise pressure on the governments and public administrations the same way as what happens against the brands. It behoves us to ensure responsible behaviour from all. We propose an extension of the use of social media to monitor behaviour of governments as effectively as they are used to monitor behaviour of the corporations, with the help of the same corporations.

Companies would join consumers for two main reasons: because there are clear signs that their company’s reputation is being harmed by the conflict, and because their market performance dips, coinciding with pressure from stakeholders. Our proposal goes beyond this and proposes the concept of a novel social figure: the unknown stakeholder.

The current study seeks to present and examine the strategies, management and dissemination of information on social media platforms by Israeli government organizations and agencies.

The article uses the “Case Study” approach, through semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with directors in charge of the use of social media in government departments.

The findings indicate that government agencies tend to favor Facebook over other social network platforms, in order to reach the widest possible audience. They do this by adhering to the platform's limitations, such as regularly using sponsored advertising to increase reach and visibility, and also by publishing visual content, such as videos and images, at the expense of text. In addition, the impact of respondents to adopt social media outweighs the use and importance awarded to traditional government websites. A clear preference is evident toward cultivating and strengthening existing information on social media at the expense of further developing official websites.

Findings and conclusions from this type of research can help digital media directors and content editors in government agencies, to improve the quality of their content and improve the accessibility of the information they share online. In addition, the findings of the study strengthen the growing body of knowledge focused on the relationship between government ministries and social media.

This research aims to investigate the impact of the use of social media on the organizational form and function in selected local governments of Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.

This research used quantitative and qualitative methods. The researchers not only conducted comparative– explanatory studies among the three ASEAN cities but also used multiple-informant and secondary data analyses. All variables are operationalized into indicators and transformed into a questionnaire in three languages: English, Indonesian and Thai. Primary data for the research were collected using a cross-sectional survey conducted in Bandung City, Indonesia; Iligan City, the Philippines; and Pukhet City, Thailand.

This research found that social media use has not yet affected the internal organizational processes in the three cities. Also, social media use is not appropriated as a space for citizen–government interaction. It is used for only information dissemination to the public; social media seems to have been used for only collecting information from citizens but not for involving them in the decision-making process.

This research covers only three cities in the ASEAN countries, and the findings cannot be generalized to others. Moreover, this research looks at the supply-side dimension or government organization side only. However, the findings confirm that findings of previous research studies that social media use in the local government is only for information dissemination.

Legal bases for social media use could be an urgent matter to address to advance more fundamental changes in government processes.

There is no prior comparative study on the use of social media by local governments in the ASEAN countries. Social media owing to its sense of personalization or sense of community improves communication between citizens and government better than e-government sites; however, as articulated by Mirchandani et al. (2008), social media may hinder rather than facilitate the delivery of services (Mirchandani et al., 2008). This is due to the absence of a legal basis of its use, as well as agreements on the manner of its use, which prevents full integration of social media into the governance process, particularly in the cases of the cities of Iligan, the Philippines, and Phuket, Thailand.

As social media technologies permeate public life, the current forms of collaboration between government and non-government stakeholders are changing. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social media use reconfigures the organizing practices around such collaboration. A case study of a collaborative e-government project showcases how emergent organizing practices through external social media differ from existing ones along the dimensions of time, task, team and transition.

This paper presents a case study of a collaborative e-government project on open data, organized by Shanghai Municipality, local businesses, universities and non-governmental organizations, using an external social media platform, WeChat. Adopting the theoretical lens of temporary organization, the paper identifies the key aspects of change emerged in the organizing practices of this collaboration.

The findings outline how the use of external social media reconfigures the collaboration between government and non-government stakeholders along the four dimensions of time, task, team and transition. The new form of collaboration is reconfigured along the lines of (1) an ad hoc and non-linear management of time; (2) discursive task creation, assignment and engagement among stakeholders; (3) a serendipitous engagement of team members based on expertise; and (4) a shift in formal and informal organizing practices.

This paper provides insights on the use of external social media for collaboration in e-government research and develops the concept of temporary organization in a sociomaterial setting. It also provides practical suggestions on how to manage new forms of public projects leveraging on the capacity of external social media.

The purpose of this paper is to identify governmental social media use in cities with enhanced information and communications technology infrastructures (i.e. Informational World Cities) and high Internet penetration rates. Social media platforms are increasingly being used by governments to foster user interaction and it was investigated if social media platforms are valuable tools for reaching high numbers of citizens.

This paper is based on an iterative content and Web analysis from November 2012 till January 2013 and offers a comparison of different social media service types and the particular use.

This empirical investigation of 31 Informational World Cities provides an overview of social media services used for governmental purposes, of their popularity among governments and of their usage intensity in broadcasting information online. Even as cities in a globalized world become more similar, a variety in the use of social media by governments was detected, which is due to regional and cultural characteristics.

The findings are limited to calculable data, e.g. number of used social media accounts, posts and followers which were available through a content and Web analysis at the time of investigation.

A more detailed content analysis, as well as a more differentiated analysis of users, must be conducted in the future.

This paper is one of the first that presents a global comparison of governmental social media use of cities of the knowledge society and compares different social media platforms.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the contemporary implementation of social media within the public sector in the Kingdom of Bahrain by reviewing each of the ministry’s presence in the social media especially on specific social media websites (Twitter, Facebook and YouTube). This study also attempts to identify the types of information that the public is interested to receive from various government social media accounts.

A descriptive analysis with frequency distribution and weighted mean was used to analyze the demographic profile of the respondents, internet preferences and government information sources. The study has employed two types of survey methods in collecting data, namely, checklist and questionnaire surveys. A snowball sampling technique was employed for the sampling selection. Among the selected respondents of 500, 384 (76.8 percent) respondents completely responded to the questionnaires.

The study has confirmed the fact that most of the Bahrain Government’s ministries have social media platforms with a minimum of at least one official account to reach out to the various segments of the society. It also reveals that the respondents are active internet users who are looking for information in different platforms, i.e. search engines, social media, and have interests in different media forms like blogs, forums, official websites as well as multimedia images and videos. Meanwhile, the respondents are found to be interested in various types of information from the government that ranges from serious topics like emergency alerts, citizens’ rights and healthcare, to lighter topics like ways to protect the environment, science and technology and job seeking advice.

This clearly declares the inevitability of an increase in the dissemination of information by the Government of Bahrain through social media. The recommendations in this research could be highly beneficial for the Government of Bahrain if implemented as it could improve the cyber relationship between the government and the public.

This paper aims to investigate the perceptions of Omani citizens toward the use of social media by the government for participatory and interactive relationships. More precisely, the descriptive nature of the study resides in its ability to explain how social media users regard the current status and levels of presence, transparency, engagement, responsiveness and trust about the current use of social media by the Omani Government.

A quantitative approach was used to collect data. This was done via a self-administered questionnaire from a return sample of 1,769 citizens drawn from different places in Oman. These citizens were considered as well-informed and regular active users of social media. The reviewed literature provided a basis for the construct of the questionnaire.

The overall results indicated modest levels of agreement in all of the investigated factors. The neutral findings suggest that there is a level of uncertainty among the respondents regarding how the government is determining the potential of social media for participatory and interactive relationships. Findings in this study advocate the outcomes of the recent Arab Social Media Report, plus the few relevant studies included in the literature, which nearly stated that although there is a growing use of social media among citizens, governments are failing to take full advantage of social media. Governments are also failing to engage citizens to design and deliver more efficient and collaborative services, per this study’s findings.

The findings call for the importance of strategically framing the use of participatory social media by the government. In a broader sense, the findings of this study are beneficial to all contexts that share similar political and socio-economic philosophy, especially the Arab states and most of the developing countries. The findings provide insights for governments in need of developing social media strategies to promote more collaborative and interactive governance.

The study aids in understanding the views of citizens who are the current major players in a highly technology-driven environment. This environment is found to be transforming the relationship between citizens and governments. The study adds knowledge to the currently scarce body of literature dealing with issues pertaining to citizen–government relationships in social media in the Arab states, and similar contexts in developing countries. Its findings may provide valuable insights for policy makers to leverage collaborative relationships between governments and citizens.

This study aims to explore Twitter use by Korea's central government by classifying the government's Twitter-based networking strategies into government-to-citizen (G2C) and government-to-government (G2G) strategies.

The study investigates the nature of social media interactions and networking strategies in the Korean government by extracting tweets, follower/following relationships, and hyperlinks for 32 ministries. Network patterns and networking strategies are reviewed through descriptive statistical analysis and social network analysis to map the government's Twitter activity.

The results indicate that the government's direct networking strategy targeting citizens does not necessarily motivate their participation in the government's social media activities but that it plays an instrumental role in reinforcing G2G relationships.

This study investigates the social media use patterns (e.g. network properties and co-link analyses) and strategies (e.g. the reciprocity of relationships and content-push strategies) in the context of G2C and G2G relationships in Korea's public sector.