CORMSIS Seminar "An Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove": The Embodiment of the Platform Logic in the Emergency Sector" - Stan Karanasios Event

Event details

Despite increasing attention to the role of social media platforms in emergencies, research has tended to focus on citizen use or how they are deployed by single organizations. We draw on the concept of institutional logics to examine the transformative impact of social media platforms in the emergency sector. A qualitative theory-generating case study of the emergency sector is undertaken, comprised of interviews with 29 organizations including emergency response organizations, government agencies, NGOs, private organizations, and community groups. Our contribution is to articulate a theoretical understanding of the influence of platforms on dominant ‘command and control’ and ‘community’ logic, the organizational responses that such influence generates, and the rise of new information practices. We show that the information practices adopted by the organizations are dependent not only on the dynamics of the organizational field, but also on which logic an organization mostly embodies, and the resultant tensions that shape how organizations enact platforms. We propose a model that reveals that organizational context and sector dynamics are pivotal arbiters of how the organizations reinforce, compartmentalize, or hybridize of the command and control logic with the community logic. The model suggests that the way that platforms are interpreted and enacted can reinforce and alter the logics. We also develop a matrix to capture the interconnections of information practices at sector level and how they embody both logics to account for diverse needs of citizens.