Does social media transform city government? A case study of three ASEAN cities: Bandung, Indonesia, Iligan, Philippines and Pukhet, Thailand

2.1 Social government and organizational transformation

Oginni (2015) said that the development of social media tools over the past decade has altered modes of communications between governments and citizens. Social media has opened ways for greater political participation, thereby creating new social dynamics. It is an internet-based tool that unifies geographically dispersed individuals on virtual platforms through user-generated content. Leavey (2013) defines social media as a social structure made of nodes, comprising individuals or organizations tied by one or more specific types of interdependencies, such as values, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade. In reality, the innovative tool brings together people of common value systems, visions and aspirations to collaboratively form opinions on issues of concerns in virtually connected environments. Pinzón (2013) posits that social media is part of a wider trend in a communication landscape that is characterized by mass collaboration; it is responsible for a significant portion of time expended online. In the context of this study, social media refers to online tools that permit real-time interaction and feedback (for instance, Web 2.0); it is a broad term that extends beyond Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to include e-government.

Social media can also be seen as a productive tool that relives social struggle and policy-making. The concept of public policy was developed in response to heightened social struggle and duties of governments to ensure citizens’ welfare (Nyong’o, 1998). Public policy is concerned with how societal issues are defined, constructed and approached on a political level, and it is used to examine the effects of a government’s actions or inactions. Although the inclusion of inaction may seem counter-intuitive, public policy encompasses all aspects of a government’s decision-making process (Mergel, 2013; Simon et al., 2015). Social media can transform government organization into a social government (s-government). This transformation results from the capability of social media to enable organizational change, which requires the management of projects or programs to develop or integrate systems, leadership and change in culture or organizational factor (Klievink and Janssen, 2009; Kavanaugh et al., 2012, Johannessen et al., 2016). However, based on some previous studies, social media use could influence position or membership of a government employee (legal issue), an organization, a culture, a communication and then the decision-making process (Linder and Nicole, 2012;Kavanaugh et al., 2012; Khan et al., 2014) (Table I).

2.2 Organizational factor

A government organization is a unit of the social system that is strongly affected by it. In a social system, organizations conduct experiments that concur with our everyday experience with them (Achterbergh and Vrients, 2009). According to Luhmann, an organization belongs to the class of an autopoietic system as a result of decisions and function, as a decision premises for follow-up decisions (Achterbergh and Vrients, 2009). Furthermore, Luhmann argued that viewing organizations as merely consist merely of goals and/or means to realize them is to mistake results of organizing for organizing itself (Achterbergh and Vrients, 2009). The theory of autopoiesis was developed by two Chilean cognitive biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in the 1960s and early 1970s. Abstracting from life, autopoiesis is defined as a general form of system-building using self-referential closure. We would have to admit that there are non-living autopoietic systems, different modes of autopoietic reproduction and general principles of autopoietic organization which materialize as life, and also in other modes of circularity and self-reproduction. In other words, if we find non-living autopoietic systems in our world, only then will we need a truly general theory of autopoiesis which carefully avoids references that hold true for only living systems (Luhmann, 1986, p. 172). The basic building block of social systems is communication. Communication consists of information, utterance and understanding, and it allows for a system’s self-constitution. Luhmann defines social systems as being principally boundary-maintaining systems (Hernes and Bakken, 2003). Luhmann conceives of communication as a combination of three components: information, utterance and understanding, each of which Luhmann conceptualised as selection.

Information is a selection from a repertoire of possibilities. Every communication selects what is being communicated from everything that could have been communicated. Utterance refers to the form of and reason for a communication (Luhmann, 2003) or how and why something is being said. It is the selection of a particular form and reason from all possible forms and reasons. Understanding is the distinction between information and utterance (Seidl, 2004; Karantzeni and Gouscos, 2013).

Communications that communicate a selection as a selection include elements of organizations (Achterbergh and Vrients, 2009). Communication has an inner structure as a selection of a set of selectable options, and it can be recognized as a decision and as being connected to prior decisions and thereby contribute to the self-production of the organization (Luhmann, 2000). An organization needs a structure to support the production of elements by elements, namely, decision premises. Decision premises involves three aspects: normative points of reference, providing a focus for the production of follow-up decisions; decision premises, contributing to the regulation of the production of decisions by marking decisions from them; and a new decision takes into account existing decision premises as presuppositions (Achterbergh and Vrients, 2009).

2.3 Membership

How do decision premises work in an organization? There are nine types of decision premises, namely,: membership, communication pathway, decision programs, personnel, positions, planning, self-description, organizational culture and cognitive routine (Achterbergh and Vrients, 2009). In an organization, only members can contribute to the generation of decisions. However, using social media, citizens influence direction and outcomes of the government, improve the government’s situational awareness and may even help execute government services on a day-to-day basis (Linder and Nicole, 2012). In other words, citizens are members of government organization who can contribute to the generation of government decision on a day-to-day basis. Governments’ transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 will require fundamental organizational and administrative changes, as many of the emerging social-collaborative technologies sit uncomfortably with public sector hierarchies and decision-making processes (McNutt, 2014), and social networking government (Panagiotopoulos et al., 2011). The social-collaborative technology is a valuable tool for identifying the main issues perceived by citizens with respect to a particular social problem or domain of government activity and for collecting from the citizens interesting ideas on possible solutions and directions of government activity (i.e. for applying crowdsourcing ideas in the public sector) (Spiliotopoulou et al., 2014).

2.4 Organizational culture and cognitive routine

Like other organization scholars, Luhmann (2006) argues that organization has undecided decision premises, namely, organizational culture and cognitive routine. Organizational culture has basic values woven into the fabric of the organization, as well as undecided rules for decent behavior or for the attribution of blame or praise, which are also examples of cultural decision premises (Achterbergh and Vrients, 2009). Cognitive routines are a by-product of ongoing practices in the organization’s relation to its social and non-social environments. One character of the government is a joined-up or integrated government service delivery; governments have to deal with the problem of fragmentation within the constitutional, legal and jurisdictional limits (Scholl et al., 2012). Today, the most significant barriers to social media adoption are organizational, cultural and legal – not technological (McNutt, 2014). Government organizations should be willing to investigate whether more playful interactions with citizens can help to engage on serious issues (Meijer et al., 2012). The application of social media methods will not lead automatically to better and more socially rooted and responsive public policies, if it is not combined with a change of culture of public servants and politicians (Spiliotopoulou et al., 2014).

2.5 Communication and organizational structure

The second type of decision premise is a communication pathway, prescribing the “route” that should be followed in operations, to be counted as decision in an organization (Achterbergh and Vrients, 2009). Luhmann (2000) argued that the communication pathway does not necesarily involve “hierarchy, but also a lateral communication one”. Luhmann’s (2005) fundamental idea was that organizations decide by themselves what is considered as a decision. This applies to decision communication as well. Personnel and position in public administration are organizational structuring variables (Weerakkody, 2009). Luhmann argues that competencies and experiences are very important for decision premises. Luhmann (2005) also states that the nature of decision communication changes when the time to make a decision occurs. If decision communication is seen as communication, which leads to a decision, then the post-decisional information of decision communication differs from pre-decisional communication. Communication mediated by ICT (or social media) provides a virtual platform for an informal and open sharing of thoughts, expectations, assumptions and values which offers an opportunity to form alliances of collective responsibility, which may be different from the formal hierarchies of management relationships within the parent organization (Mezgar, 2006). Another research recommended that government organization should implement its networking strategy by mobilizing Twitter accounts of various government institutions and promoting their cooperation instead of following Twitter accounts of citizens or networking with them (Khan et al., 2014). In other words, Klievink and Janssen (2009) proposed the integration of ICT into government organization. Integration in government can be defined as the “forming of a larger unit of government entities, temporary or permanent, for the purpose of merging processes and/or sharing information” (Scholl et al., 2012). Hence, integration extends to both process integration and information integration (sharing) (Klischewski, 2004) and pertains to the institutional dimension and in part to the high-level functional dimension (Kubicek et al., 2009; Tsohou et al., 2014).

In other words, as opposed to interoperation or interoperability, which alludes to the technical and lower-level functional aspects, integration refers to the non-technical and governance aspects of intra- and inter-government collaboration. Further, following Scholl and Klischewski’s set of definitions, interoperation “occurs whenever independent or heterogeneous information systems or their components controlled by different jurisdictions/administrations or by external partners smoothly and effectively work together in a predefined and agreed upon fashion” (Scholl et al., 2012), whereas interoperability “is the technical capability for e-Government interoperation” (Scholl et al., 2012). In a functional perspective, IT-based interoperation encompasses layers such as technical (signal-level) interoperation, syntactic (data-level) interoperation, semantic (information/meaning-level) interoperation and finally business process interoperation (Kubicek et al., 2009). Others propose to distinguish further between technology (computer), business process, information, values and goals when analyzing government integration and interoperation projects (Gottschalk, 2009).

2.6 Personnel and position

Personnel and position in public administration are organizational structuring variables (Weerakkody, 2009). Luhmann (2005) argues that competencies and experience are very important for decision premises, and he also states that the nature of decision communication changes when the time to make a decision occurs. If decision communication is seen as communication, which leads to a decision, then the post-decisional information of decision communication differs from pre-decisional communication. Communication mediated by ICT (or social media) provides a virtual platform for an informal and open sharing of thoughts, expectations, assumptions and values which offers an opportunity to form alliances of collective responsibility which may be different from the formal hierarchies of management relationships within the parent organization (Mezgar, 2006). Information factors consist of communications and information technology (Kavanaugh et al., 2012). Those aspects are important variables regarding the relationship between government organization and citizen used to study Arlington County. The influence of ICT use on organization transformation process in The Netherlands confirms the aforementioned findings (Klievink and Janssen, 2009). However, bureaucratic behaviors are also undeniably linked to the culture and structure of the organization within which they work, and the managers from whom they receive direction (Fulla and Welch, 2002). Moreover, the relationship between citizen and bureaucrat continues to be based on public service. As a result, any model of interaction between citizen and government must explicitly include the broader social contexts from which they originate. Fulla and Welch (2002) furthermore expect that the organization can choose among five options for response to an asynchronous query: non-response, generic response, direct informational response, referred informational response and referred action.

Meanwhile, the response level is dependent on the performance of the virtual team in a certain organization, and the link between the virtual team members is more social and psychological in nature (Mezgar, 2006). The virtual teams function on trust rather than control (Handy in Mezgar, 2006) which requires lateral communication and active involvement from each individual under a flat organizational structure, participatory management practices and novel schemes of shared responsibility (Mezgar, 2006). The Luhmannian perspective developed here helps us to address the relatively neglected questions of how the operating and strategy routines of an organization are related to each other, and how both are related to the generation of strategic change (Hendry and Seidl, 2003). Social systems for Luhmann are not, therefore, systems of action, structured in terms of the thoughts and behaviours of individual actors, but these are systems of communications in which communication determines what further communication occurs. Luhmann introduces his concept of episode in the context of societal change, and it does not feature explicitly in his accounts of organizations.

From a social systems perspective, the routine suspension of normal operating structures is essential for the long-term survival of an organization and an integral part of its structure. The second insight is that strategic episodes are important for not only changing strategies but also confirming and reinforcing them. The third insight, which again challenges the exceptionalist view, is that for the line management of an organization, strategic episodes are the routine focus of strategic practice. The fourth insight concerns the relationship between organizational strategy and the practices of “strategists”. Government organizational culture in the emerging “digital era governance” (DEG) and “transformational government” (t-gov) paradigms is such that “citizens and businesses will increasingly co-produce most individual outputs using electronic processes, leaving agencies to provide only a facilitating framework” (Dunleavy et al., 2005) and “citizen empowerment” (CS Transform, 2010; Waller and Genius, 2015).

2.7 Public policy-making

Luhmann (2005) emphasizes that decision communications are not produced by human beings but by the social system, or by the organization. Luhmann sees decisions as the elements of an organization and “compact communications”, which communicate their own contingency. Luhmann (2005) also theorizes that decision communication is the only form of communication that contributes to the autopoiesis of an organization. Decision programs are regulative conditions for correct or incorrect decision behavior, namely, goal program and conditional program (Achterbergh and Vrients, 2009). Goal programs specify goals (desired) that should be pursued, depending on the circumtances or expected side effect, and conditional programs have a general form that allows for different levels of specification (Achterbergh and Vrients, 2009).

When government managers face the growing demand from netizens via social media, they are not producing sequential decisions, or one decision after the other, but they can produce multiple coherent decisions at the same moment in time and at different moments in time (Achterbergh and Vrients, 2009). Luhmann defines those decisions as planning. However, organizations have other means of integrating decision premises, namely, self-description. Self-description function is a means to unify the multitude of decision premises (Achterbergh and Vrients, 2009). IT was primarily used to automate existing operations and to increase the speed of communication. Automation within organizational functions meant that routine information collection and storage tasks were taken over by IT, replacing paper and people with electrons, without fundamentally changing the way work was done as “automated plumbing” (Zammuto et al., 1999). This means organizations are not “sequential mechanisms” producing one decision after the other, but at the same time organizations must coordinate “event-like” (via social media) character of decision, called planning (Luhmann, 2006; Achterbergh and Vrients, 2009). Organizations have to decide what to observe in the environment, how to observe it and which conclusions to draw from their observations (Kieser and Leiner, 2009). Decisions are the basic elements of organizations. When making decisions, managers refer to earlier decisions, including decisions on how to observe and interpret the environment, and thus establish self-referentiality (Seidl, 2004).

In each stage of policy processes, technology has an important role to play in the digital age. The policy process requires quality inputs, decision-making and feedback mechanisms to be successful. One important quality of enhanced policy is wide participation in the policy process. Social media thereby presents an opportunity to incorporate a multitude of opinions or alternatives during policy processes. Citizen engagement is crucial in directing policy to the most pertinent issues within the receiving locality (Imurana et al., 2014).

A recent study on online activity in social media for public policy, social and political issues of some selected countries reveals that developing countries seem to have the highest proportion of engagement in online public policy and social and political issues (Ipsos-Markinor, 2012; Sáez-Martín et al., 2014). The argument was based on the assertion that the democratic history and experience of a country plays a role in the magnitude of online engagements and extent of social media use as “business models” for the development of an e-government (Beynon-Davies, 2007). That is, a grown-up democratic country tends to have a more organized system of channels for citizens to air their views than emerging economies. At each stage of the public policy process, factors such as social distance between policymakers and the general public, information asymmetry, politicization of policy implementation and weakened feedback mechanisms have been identified as challenges to public policy processes in Africa (Imurana et al., 2014). However, in terms of citizen influence, social media did not provide a well-functioning public sphere in policymaking or just one of many channels where low-power stakeholders attempted to reach out (Johannessen et al., 2016).

4.1 Bandung case

Since Ridwan Kamil became Bandung’s Mayor in 2013, he has been using social media, specifically Twitter, as a communication channel between government and citizens. Mayor Decree No. 1352/2014 laid down policies on communication between city government and citizen, namely:

• mandatory social media use in all city government agencies;

• mandatory use of LAPOR 1708 (REPORT 1708);

• photo-based report; and

• e-report of subdistrict program.

The important reason for using social media (Twitter) is to shorten the communication path and to cut the bureaucratic red tape in the reporting system. The Bandung City Government has established 23 Twitter accounts of city agencies which are monitored by a local application portal called “Suara Bandung” (Bandung Voice). This portal assesses the performance of each account by counting response rates and sentiments (Figure 4).

It is interesting to find out that policymakers in Bandung City think that Web 2.0 technologies are appropriate as a space where citizens can interact with the city government in terms of information dissemination, dialogue, managing inputs from community and in prioritizing city programs.

4.2 Pukhet City, Thailand

In the case of Pukhet City, some respondents confirm that using social media in organizations is a good thing, but its effectiveness depends on which Line groups are posted and the group’s membership. It is important that a powerful person be in that group Line, otherwise it would be the same typical complaining process that takes a long time. Moreover, the community or people must be strong and engaging. The data/information in Line are/is cannot be trusted always. Some are true, others are not. It depends on which side or group posted the information. Some people are chosen to highlight issues through city council members because they have close relationships with them. They believe that this may make the process faster than through Line, or this may get better solutions. Complaining via Line may not reach the mayor, as he may read messages in Line only once or few times per day. If only the staff read the Line messages, they may or may not report those messages within that day. It is unclear which problem is priority and no one can decide. Using social media in municipalities is not like using a communication tool. Rather, it seems to be a decision-making tool. It helps in making decisions faster. If a problem complaint comes into picture, it can be printed out as empirical evidence and ready to be sent out for further actions. It is obvious that Line is better than other regular ways, as it will not waste time, such as time for filling a form.

Mostly, social media is only a channel for organizational PR, not for receiving complaints from the people. “Complaining via Line cannot reach the Mayor. It may take many days until he reads and it will take longer until he decides to give an order”. However, social media can create the power of community. When an important issue is posted, other members go to the Line group to share their opinions. For example, in case of a tunnel excavation, most of the group members disagreed; thus, once the issue was posted, they posted messages to resist that project. They have harmony. The power of community comes from the power of social media. Although social media cannot be a panacea to cure all problems, it is a good tool for groups to voice their issues to city council members or the mayor. If a group has a powerful member, the group will benefit.

Social media may be a new thing in the context of Thailand which could lead to wrong usage. Sometimes, someone shares what was posted without careful thoughts. However, we can start seeing the development of social media use. Previously, we have wasted time for long meetings and travelling, but nowadays, we can have a meeting through Line. Complaining in the old fashion requires physically going to the organizations and meeting in person. We need to learn more on using social media continuously. For responding to complaints from communities, it depends on whether the issue makes a large impact on a community and how much the impact will be. If the issue has an impact on an individual only and not the public, or to a small area only, the response may be late.The effectiveness of using social media also depends on how clear the organization’s goals and policies are in relation to Line usage. A policy about receiving complaint procedure via Line should be clearly stated: for example, to whom should a complaint issue printout be sent to? Who should approve? That should be really clear-cut. Yet, presently, we do not know the procedure in Line for complaining. If the organizations have knowledge of the step-by-step complaint procedure in Line, the people or communities would benefit and they will have trust. It is possible that the people now lack trust on the social media tool of the city as the process is unknown, and using the social media is still in the developing/testing stage. The city also is on a trial-and-error phase regarding social media use. Some of the reasons why people choose to make a complaint through city council members is that the people may not believe in Line, and that city council members play an important role in assigning jobs, and they always try to take action on jobs to keep people’s votes. One respondent said that social media in organizations is used only for the city PR to spread information to the community.

4.3 Iligan City, Philippines

For public information, Iligan City maintains a website where vital information regarding the city and updates of its operations are posted for public consumption. The city also has a Facebook account where public opinions, complaints and emergency notes can be posted. Public engagements are facilitated through the social media and through the broadcast media. Announcers of many radio stations of the city are connected to the public through Facebook and they are supplied with daily information from the public which enriches the database for their daily announcements and commentaries. The pervasive use of Facebook among Iliganons, which was made possible by the introduction of the mobile phone with its capability to manage both written and graphical data, made social media a very important means of communication in the city.

In Iligan City, Phillipines, the ICTC is a section under the Office of the Mayor which takes care of the communication system of the local government, including its website. The center is maintained by IT experts who are responsible in managing information that are vital in decision-making. However, also Facebook’s collected information does not have much impact on decision-making process because each department has its own mechanism.