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

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.

Envisioning legitimacy: visual dimensions of NGO annual reports

“…The mention of "broader society" is also a reminder that NGOs are increasingly communicating through social media; as such, social media platforms may serve as significant sites of accountability as well as contested legitimacy. According to Karunakaran et al (2022), social media generates "crowd-based accountability" -pressures here are both less clear (less rooted in performance metrics) and more publicly visible, necessitating reactive and varied organizational communications to minimize risks of reputational damage. Compared to annual reports, then, visual representations on social media platforms, and the corresponding legitimacy claims, may be more varied.…”

“…This study investigates NGO legitimacy and legitimation practices, especially the communicative dimensions, by analyzing the imagery in humanitarian annual reports. While organizations can and do avail themselves of a wide array of media tools, including most recently social media platforms (Karunakaran et al, 2022), the annual reporta powerful and epistemic medium of communicationplays an important role in securing organizational legitimacy (Kent & Zunker, 2013;Ogden & Clarke, 2005). Specifically, as a technology of accountability, annual reports provide organizations a means to report on their performances, that is, on the effectiveness of their activities, and also communicate details about their characteristics and values so as to align them to the belief systems of constituents from whom they seek legitimacy (on UK NGOs, see Davison, 2010;Dhanani & Connolly, 2015; see also Suchman, 1995).…”

How Idealized Professional Identities Can Persist through Client Interactions

“…Such identities may then persist when they are granted by select clients. By taking client interactions seriously, this study advances the ''relational turn'' in the study of occupations and professions (Eyal, 2013;Huising, 2015;Anteby, Chan, and DiBenigno, 2016), demonstrating the importance of clients and other audiences for intimately shaping professionals' work practices (Ramarajan and Reid, 2020;Satterstrom, Kerrissey, and DiBenigno, 2020;Anteby and Holm, 2021;Chan and Hedden, 2021;Chen, Christianson, and Zhong, 2021;Karunakaran, Orlikowski, and Scott, 2022).…”

“…Clients may be most likely to deny professionals their idealized identities when they have the power to evaluate professionals' services and/or when organizations actively promulgate client roles that run counter to professionals' idealized identity expectations. When organizations align their interests with clients' interests instead of their professional employees' interests, as depicted in theory on the ''service triangle,'' this alignment is expected to come at employees' expense (Lopez, 2010;Chan and Hedden, 2021;Karunakaran, Orlikowski, and Scott, 2022). This study suggests, however, that such an alliance can negatively impact organizations and their clients by generating denied idealized identity claims for professionals that result in identity-threatening client service practices, which ultimately undermine organizations' client satisfaction goals.…”

Emerging Technologies at Work: Policy Ideas to Address Negative Consequences for Work, Workers, and Society

“…A further concern with heightened surveillance capabilities is the extraorganizational control of workers, as occurs on digital work platforms (Rahman and Valentine 2021). In a study of how ''the crowd'' holds service organizations accountable through social media posts, Karunakaran, Orlikowski, and Scott (2022) documented that when people berate 911 call dispatchers on Twitter or call out hotel staff on TripAdvisor, these backstage workers who typically toil in relative obscurity are now named and shamed in public forums, providing a form of customer-achieved control that is both constant and unpredictable. Workers never know which customer interaction throughout their shift will prompt a tweet or review.…”