Crowd-Based Accountability: Examining How Social Media Commentary Reconfigures Organizational Accountability

Arvind Karunakaran (), Wanda J. Orlikowski () and Susan V. Scott ()
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Arvind Karunakaran: Desautels Faculty of Management, Strategy & Organization, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1G5, Canada
Wanda J. Orlikowski: Sloan School of Management, Information Technology and Organization Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142
Susan V. Scott: Information Systems Faculty, Department of Management, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom

Organization Science, 2022, vol. 33, issue 1, 170-193

Abstract: Organizational accountability is considered critical to organizations’ sustained performance and survival. Prior research examines the structural and rhetorical responses that organizations use to manage accountability pressures from different constituents. With the emergence of social media, accountability pressures shift from the relatively clear and well-specified demands of identifiable stakeholders to the unclear and unspecified concerns of a pseudonymous crowd. This is further exacerbated by the public visibility of social media, materializing as a stream of online commentary for a distributed audience. In such conditions, the established structural and rhetorical responses of organizations become less effective for addressing accountability pressures. We conducted a multisite comparative study to examine how organizations in two service sectors (emergency response and hospitality) respond to accountability pressures manifesting as social media commentary on two platforms (Twitter and TripAdvisor). We find organizations responding online to social media commentary while also enacting changes to their practices that recalibrate risk, redeploy resources, and redefine service. These changes produce a diffractive reactivity that reconfigures the meanings, activities, relations, and outcomes of service work as well as the boundaries of organizational accountability. We synthesize these findings in a model of crowd-based accountability and discuss the contributions of this study to research on accountability and organizing in the social media era.

Keywords: research design and methods; qualitative research; social media; field study; organization and management theory; digital technology; occupations and professions; practice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:33:y:2022:i:1:p:170-193

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