With an increased use of external online platforms, digital government logics are gradually intertwined with external, algorithmic, crowd-influenced value logics of social media platforms. This new scene especially affects administration, which can no longer neutrally deliver public service, but becomes involved in processes of consideration and judging what rules and traditions seem most appropriate in the situation.Through deep interviews and workshops with municipal communicators, we examine this balancing act when communicators use social media for external communication. We use a practice perspective to characterize and conceptualize an emerging approach to public service.

Since 2002 University West, Sweden has had a mission from the Swedish government to develop methods for work integrated learning (WIL). WIL is thus a “trademark” of the university and the university is continuously developing teaching models to enhance a synergy between theory and practice with the goal to improve education and students’ lifelong learning. A challenge in such work is a decreasing engagement among students to participate in seminars at campus, especially during periods of internship. In the study underlying this paper we therefore explore a new teaching and learning method that aims to stimulate students to come to campus and to discuss their experiences with peer students and teachers during their internship.The internship and the seminars are organized as a ‘WIL course’ in the fifth semester of the candidate program ‘Digital Media’. As part of the course the students spend four days a week in a workplace where they contribute substantially to the work at the workplace. One day a week they spend at campus to reflect, write and discuss topics related to the work and organization at the workplace e.g. organizational culture, how a work day is organized, how design work is organized, and how the workplace treats its customers. The students and teachers meet once every second week for a seminar where they discuss the above-mentioned themes. The reflections made at the seminars and the conversations are important for the learning goals at the course. However, the teachers experience a moderate interest from the students’ side to participate and the students tend to be ill prepared.To increase the value and learning for the students, a new approach for better structure and engagement has been introduced, where students in beforehand writtenly reflect on questions about their workplace in relation to the theme of the week. They write in open and shared documents so that all students before the seminare can take part of each others reflections and as such come to the seminar with a wider perspective on the particular theme. The seminar is then held at the campus where the themes are discussed and workplaces compared with help of a shared matrix where the students can place their workplace regarding level of structure, formality, creativity etc . As such the seminar has a ‘flipped’ character and the ICT tools for learning used are open and editable over time for all participants.The empirical material is based on 24 hours participant observations, 10 students’ written reflections and the course curricula. The findings show that the flipped and open approach to the seminars has made the students more engaged in reflections about their workplace, not only during the seminar at campus but also during their work at the workplace. The shared document stimulates reflections of differences between workplaces that has not been so clear before, and the matrix has helped the students to take the reflections to a higher level by reflecting over organizational culture and workplace conditions. By comparing each other’s experiences from a spectrum of different aspects/themes they get a more nuanced picture of the skills and competences needed in the workplace, and they get more strengthened in their professional role. The recurrent discussions over time during the course therefore contribute to make the students more experienced than they would had been by only having got the experience from their own workplace.

Governments are in need to innovate public service. They struggle with complex societal problems, decreased citizen trust and the work of adapting to new demands related to how service should be delivered to fit contemporary living. Inspired by success stories from the private sector's "open innovation" approaches, governments are complementing internal competence with knowledge resources of external actors such as citizens. One increasingly growing strategy for knowledge expansion beyond government boundaries has been to use social media platforms, e.g. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This strategy has been shown to be especially effective at a local government level (henceforth municipality) where citizens are geographically close to the government and where government manages activities that citizens rely on in their daily lives.

Despite an expansive rise of social media use in municipalities, and efforts to see beyond a traditional and New Public Management approach to public service, there is little knowledge about the participatory and innovative capacity of social media in a government context. This knowledge gap is reflected in researchers' and municipal administrators' uncertainty as to how to make use of social media for improvement of public service and how to handle tensions about what is possible to do with social media and what is legitimate to do as a public servant.

The aim of the thesis is thus to map, unpack and conceptualize social media practice by municipal communicators to understand how tensions and dynamics between social media mechanisms and government rationales are shaping the practice and how new emerging practices can be understood as public service innovation. The research questions of the thesis are: RQ1: How are social mediamechanisms supporting different public service rationales?; RQ2: How is public service enacted in the social media practice by municipal communicators?; RQ 3: How can social media practice by municipal communicators be understood as public service innovation?

With an engaged scholarship research approach, related research on social medialogic, e-government, e-governance and digital public service innovation, and with the help of the theoretical perspectives "service innovation," "practice perspective" and "sociomateriality," the thesis contributes extended insights into how social media platform mechanisms support different government rationales in processes of sociomaterial service, and how such practice can be understood as creative processes towards public service innovation.

As a practical contribution I propose that both communicators and managers in government engage together in networks of others working with social media and to discuss for instance the mission of the government in relation to the aim of using social media, what tensions arise in the social media practice and why, and how algorithms are shaping the social media practice.

The aim was to investigate whether there is a relationship between degree of e-government in Swedish municipalities and perceived satisfaction among citizens generally. This is a large-scale quantitative study based on validand reliable Swedish national surveys. Based on these surveys, a new comprehensive index for measuring "degree of digitalization" was constructed. Citizen satisfaction was measured using established indices covering three dimensions:satisfaction with living in the municipality, satisfaction with performance of government activities (delivered services), and satisfaction with transparency and influence. The results show that there is a relationship between the degree of digitalization in a municipality and the perceived satisfaction among its citizens. The degree of digitalization is related to all three dimensions of citizen satisfaction. Additionally, this study indicates that the strength of this relationship is in parity with or even stronger than the relationship between citizen satisfaction and other crucial factors such as educational level and median income

The digitalization in the public sector poses challenges for the professionals that have previously not been using digital tools as a part of their everyday practice. Building on three qualitative research projects this study shed light on contradictions and tussles, as well as possibilities re-lated to professionalism in the public sector. The three cases involve different professionals: cancer rehabilitation nurses, municipality communicators, and resident physicians. The paper aims to gain a better understanding of the impact of digitalization efforts on everyday work practices, and the emerging opportunities and challenges of using digital artifacts as a part of professional work. Our findings show how the transition toward digital work practices is pushing the professional boundaries of rooted professionalism in the public sector. The meaning of work and what it means to be a professional profoundly changes. The process of tuning professionalism in the public sector is not straight forward.

The use of social media in the public sector changes the professionals' everyday work practice. This paper sheds light on the emerging challenges of using social media as a part of work, based on the analysis of three contexts within the public sector in Sweden and through the lens of sociomateriality and affordances. The approach is interpretive field studies with a narrative analysis, where we interpret and analyse key elements of the storylines, focusing on the transition to social media use among professionals (nurses, municipal communicators, and physicians) in the three contexts. Social media enables an open work environment where information is visible and potentially spreadable to an unknown audience. The process of interacting with an unknown audience and finding a professional tone is analysed here as context collapse. The unknown, and at times imagined complex audience, makes it hard to balance the seesaw between friendliness on the one hand and an authoritative tone on the other; a tonality which leaves most of the potential audience unreached. The interplay between social media and the professionals shapes the professionals' practice. We analyse this interplaying practice more specifically, as sociomateriality in action.

This paper discusses how communicators at the municipality, in their work, negotiate the tension between a traditional role of an 'informative administrator' and a 'promoting, engaging social media profile'. The work is learned by carefully transgressing municipality social media and IT policy and by transforming social media practice from private and commercial use of Facebook, towards a new practice founded in democratic values.

Social media has become an important strategy for municipalities to disclose a massive amount of information with relatively low cost and to create engagement with citizens. However, fostering participation and citizen engagement on social media platforms is still a great challenge for municipality administration as well as for research. Despite a widespread diffusion of platforms such as Facebook in municipalities, interaction level is relatively low compared to private organisations. We know from previous research that citizens' engagement with municipalities on Facebook is related to the municipalities' tradition of openness and transparency and their local administration style. Municipalities with a tradition of transparency are to a greater extent using features in Facebook that enable citizen engagement.Hence the organisational context where the engagement takes place is a crucial factor.However, what is often forgotten when trying to understand how engagement emerges on municipality social media platforms is the intentions of the platform providers and the emerging social logic of the platforms in use. A digital platform such as Facebook cannot be regarded as one overall technology choice, but as a platform provider that promotes services and tools along with a considerable amount of conditions and regulations. As social platforms are being adopted and matured, the huge amount of data concerning user behaviour and interaction patterns has changed from being side business to core business for the platform providers. This is applied,for instance, in the possibility to harvest and sell data. Overtime, the logic of such platforms has become more advanced and its ability to shape and transform the communication patterns has grown stronger and become critical. So, what implications do such a platform logic have on municipality administrations' use of Facebook? A content analysis of online interaction on four municipalities' Facebook pages during a period of two years was conducted. Approximately 6000 posts and comments were categorised by content, media type and tone. Engagement such as likes, shares and comments were then measured for the different categories.Empirical findings indicate that municipality communicators have problems both to reach out with information and to create engagement on Facebook. It is important for the communicators to be politically neutral, correct and speak with the voice of the whole municipality (i.e. not too personal). This way of being, however, does not work so well on Facebook.They report having gradually adjusted their work (content, tone, media type and timing) to what is spreadable, sharable and commentable according to a Facebook logic. The communicators say they feel forced to post pictures of blossomtrees and check-ins from the lunch restaurant in order to get likes and shares. They know that if they don't do this they will lose citizens' attention and they will not reach out with more important posts. They are aware that posts that are interesting to see and read are not sufficient; posts also need to trigger people to like, share and comment. The socialmedia work needs to be designed in accordance with a unique Facebook platform logic.

This paper aims to contribute to the body of knowledge on IT and learning at work with a special focus on new competence in the public sector. It also extends an existing framework of e-government transparency and citizen engagement by taking into account the role of Facebook as a platform with highly structured strategies for how to foster a special kind of sociality and engagement. The practical contribution implies new knowledge for staff and management in the public sector to develop competence to manage transparency and engagement through social media.

Social media is used by the majority of Swedish municipalities. However, the highly interactive features of social media are often not taken advantage of. The study aims to get a better understanding of why social media is not used to its full potential in the municipality. Findings from an interview study with communicators in three Swedish municipalities reveal that the motivation for using social media is often difficult to turn into action. Tensions emerging in the use of social media result in hesitation, uncertainty and a slowing down of work practice. The processes of managing the tensions are characterized by boundary crossing between different communities, such as municipal communicators, elected officials and citizens, with social media itself as an equally important actor. The processes of boundary crossing by the municipal communicators are discussed in terms of learning processes and new emerging competences that might redefine the role of the municipal communicator and hence perhaps the public servant in general. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016.

Abstract

The digitalization in the public sector poses challenges for the professionals that have previously not been using digital tools as a part of their everyday practice. Building on three qualitative research projects this study shed light on contradictions and tussles, as well as possibilities related to professionalism in the public sector. The three cases involve different professionals: cancer rehabilitation nurses, municipality communicators, and resident physicians. The paper aims to gain a better understanding of the impact of digitalization efforts on everyday work practices, and the emerging opportunities and challenges of using digital artifacts as a part of professional work. Our findings show how the transition toward digital work practices is pushing the professional boundaries of rooted professionalism in the public sector. The meaning of work and what it means to be a professional profoundly changes. The process of tuning professionalism in the public sector is not straight forward.