Evolution of NGOs’ web presence – early findings II
As promised earlier, I return to present some of the early findings of my Master’s thesis. I did already discuss the easy part, social media’s effect to participation, and concluded it seems to have a positive effect. Nevertheless, it must be said that most organizations seems to use social media tools not as a participatory media but as a new way to approach citizens with their own view. Using Chadwick’s and May’s (2003) framework, this is in best case consultative.
But, let’s return to the topic of this post. Previously I promised to return to my first research question, which claimed that
the institutionalization process of the hosting organization creates less participatory environment in the organization. This will also affect the web presence, making it less participatory.
Based on the analysis of two newer organizations in my dataset, ATTAC and Roska päivässä-liike, mixed evidence appears. There have been minor shifts in ATTAC’s online presence, which went from participatory to non-participatory, and then again participatory due to the rise of the social media. In Roska päivässä-liike, this pattern can’t be observed; the site has remained the same.
As said, the evidence is mixed. Also considering the amount of variant in the participatory approach in the older organizations, there seems to be another factor than the institutionalization process, which determines how participatory the web presence is.
Well, this is a somewhat disappointing result. However, this already indicates a major problem, or as they say in the academia, an opportunity for further study, in my research. Currently I have only used external data sources of the organization. This study should be continued with interviews and other analysis of the decision regarding the online presence. In this way I could tie certain interesting patterns in the web sites, such as turning blog commenting on and off, into the organizational context.
Tags: ngo, organization, research
August 2nd, 2011 at 9:07 am
[...] noted in this blog, I resigned from Nokia a few months ago. I finished my Master’s thesis in political sciences at the University of Helsinki and continued studying computer sciences in Helsinki. For example I [...]