When Ambiguity Rules: The Emergence of Adaptive Governance from (In)Congruent Frames of Knowledge Sharing Technology

Cancan Wang (), Rony Medaglia () and Tina Blegind Jensen ()
Additional contact information
Cancan Wang: IT University of Copenhagen
Rony Medaglia: Copenhagen Business School
Tina Blegind Jensen: Copenhagen Business School

Information Systems Frontiers, 2021, vol. 23, issue 6, No 12, 1573-1591

Abstract: 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 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10796-020-10050-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:infosf:v:23:y:2021:i:6:d:10.1007_s10796-020-10050-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10796

DOI: 10.1007/s10796-020-10050-3

Access Statistics for this article

Information Systems Frontiers is currently edited by Ram Ramesh and Raghav Rao

More articles in Information Systems Frontiers from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().