When Ambiguity Rules: The Emergence of Adaptive Governance from (In)Congruent Frames of Knowledge Sharing Technology
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When Ambiguity Rules: The Emergence of Adaptive Governance from (In)Congruent Frames of Knowledge Sharing Technology Cancan Wang 1
&
Rony Medaglia 2 & Tina Blegind Jensen 2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract As increasingly diverse stakeholders engage in technology-mediated knowledge sharing, the establishment of appropriate forms of governance becomes a challenge. Existing research highlights that successful governance is a result of congruence between different stakeholders’ views and uses of technology, but the way suitable governance can emerge in the presence of incongruent or ambiguous framings of technology is still unclear. In this article, we present a case study of a collaboration between government, industry and university stakeholders, where the social media platform WeChat is used for knowledge sharing. Using the theoretical lens of the technological frames of reference (TFR), we investigate how views and uses of technology among different stakeholders shape the emergence of governance arrangements. We find that patterns of congruence and incongruence in the stakeholders’ framings of technology for knowledge sharing lead to emergent adaptive governance practices, which are characterized by selective participation, role and capability identification, and ad-hoc decision-making. Keywords Knowledge sharing . Adaptive governance . Technological frames of reference . Social media . Inter-organizational collaboration
1 Introduction Technological developments such as the open data movement, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the sharing economy require organizations to adapt to changes that might otherwise become disruptive (Chatfield and Reddick 2018; Ganapati and Reddick 2018; Halaburda and Mueller-Bloch 2019; Janssen et al. 2012; Kolbjørnsrud et al. 2016; Mergel 2016). One way for organizations to deal with such changes is to collaborate with other organizations, communities, and individuals that can bring in various fields of expertise (O’Reilly 2011; Snow et al. 2017). Nonetheless, such collaborations can easily
* Cancan Wang [email protected] Rony Medaglia [email protected] Tina Blegind Jensen [email protected] 1
Department of Business IT, IT University of Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, DK-2300 Copenhagen, Denmark
2
Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School, Howitzvej 60, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
run into difficulties in adapting to changes due to the established patterns of decision-making and institutional arrangements among the diverse stakeholders (Janssen et al. 2015). Finding the best suitable approach to governance, defined as “the solutions that individuals and organizations devise for problems of coordination” (Markus and Bui 2012, p. 165), is thus key to enhancing the adaptive capacity of these collaborations. Governance researchers claim that an adaptive governance approach can help inter-organizational collaboration stakeholders in effectively adapting to changes (Chaffin et al. 2014; Dietz et al. 2003; Janssen and van
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