Participatory Approach of Public Administration Through Social Media in the UAE Research Paper

Executive Summary

The present report outlines the major components of a proposed study on the current state of social media integration in the public sector of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the evaluation of their actual and potential impact on administrative decision making and public engagement. Besides research objectives, problem statement, problem background, and limitations, the theoretical model of Government 2.0 is explained in the introduction of the proposal since it is chosen to guide the analysis of real-life cases of social media use by the government entities in the UAE.

The methodology section discusses the descriptive study design and provides a general overview of and justification for the selection of the integrative literature review and thematic analysis as main research and analytical methods in the project. Moreover, the document comprises a literature review section that synthesizes current knowledge on the topic of interests. The report ends with a summary of ethical considerations, expected outcomes, and a timeline for study completion.

Introduction

Nowadays, information technologies and social media have become an integral part of everyday reality with millions of individuals, businesses, and non-profit organizations using them to interact with each other and facilitate knowledge development and sharing. When speaking about the application of social media in the public sector, it is believed to provide multiple advantages in terms of citizen-government relationship building, service efficiency and effectiveness, decision making transparency, and public participation in governance (Al Shamsi, et al., 2018). For this reason, governments across the world are now increasingly concerned with the integration of information technologies and social media in their regular activities as, through the implementation of the latter, they expect to enhance own innovation capacities and increase citizens’ satisfaction.

Considering the potential favorable effects of new information technologies on various public sector functions, their research is of significant importance. The present study, for instance, will be dedicated to the exploration of the roles of social media in the public sector in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

By investigating the extent to which social media are currently adopted by various governmental agencies in the country, it will be possible to identify whether the local public sector was successful in capturing the advantages that new information and communication technologies have to offer. The area of particular interest in the study will be the impact of social media use on decision making in the UAE, namely, how policies and standards are developed and become enacted there. It may be argued that widespread adoption and regular utilization of social media in the public sector can advance the quality and efficacy of the policymaking process, as well as of legal and administrative decisions.

Theoretical Background: Government 2.0

The adoption of social media by the public sector can be investigated by using the theoretical model of e-Government 2.0 that is developed based on the combination of the characteristics of Web 2.0 and a traditional e-Government framework. Overall, the word “Web 2.0” is usually utilized as an umbrella term to refer to different modern information and communication technologies that are interactive in their nature, foster networking, and facilitate content generation and media sharing among diverse users (Wilson, et al., 2011).

Karakiza (2015) distinguishes the following core qualities of those technologies: “Transparency, Honesty, Trust and Reputation” (p. 387). It is implied that as the main representatives of Web 2.0 technologies, social media can help organizations that apply them for stakeholder interaction to build greater credibility and increase openness.

As for e-Government, the concept refers to “a new form of public organization that supports and redefines the existing and new information, communication and transaction-related interactions with stakeholders (e.g., citizens and businesses) through ICT, especially through the Internet and web technologies, with the purpose of improving government performance and processes” (Chun, et al., 2010, p. 1). While in the traditional sense, e-Government may be characterized primarily by the extensive web presence and utilization of such static online media as websites, e-Government 2.0 embraces the features of Web 2.0 and, therefore, allows for a more interactive approach to public service provision, stakeholder communication, and decision making.

The described theoretical framework will be applied to analyze the level of social media integration in the UAE public sector against the context of different stages of e-Government evolution. According to Chun et al. (2010), Stage 1 is linked to the digital presence and focuses on information sharing activities that are passive in nature. Stage 2 is characterized by more dynamic yet still very simple citizen-government interactions, for instance, through e-mail services (Chun, et al., 2010).

Stage 3 is associated with the provision of online transactions, including tax payments and similar activities (Chun, et al., 2010). Lastly, in Stage 4, the government promotes public participation and collaboration in governance and strives to establish a seamless, two-way information flow (Chun, et al., 2010). After identifying the evolutionary stage at which the UAE e-Government system currently operates, it will be possible to reveal the degree of impact that social media could have on the public sector in the country.

Background of the Problem: The UAE Context

The UAE has established its e-Government system merely a decade ago, yet its launch may be viewed as a part of the government’s long-time aspiration to enhance governance efficiency and quality within the boundaries of the public sector reform and overall national strategy. The UAE’s strategy announced by the Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al-Maktoum in 2007 emphasizes the importance of sustainable economic growth and, what is more important, the Prime Minister linked this objective to the modernization of public service delivery and productivity advancement in the public sector in general (Alketbi, 2018). Therefore, the launch of the UAE e-Government has become a natural solution to the formulated task because this digital system allows for more effective management of many issues relevant to public service rendering.

However, when judged based on the degree of Web 2.0 integration, it may be argued that the state and the function of the UAE e-Government are not perfect as they currently stand. The study conducted by Al Khouri (2011) who analyzed the effectiveness of the local e-Government revealed that, by 2011, the platform was utilized by various governmental agencies primarily for information sharing (57%), digital transactions (23%), and customer interaction (20%). It means that the system has fully attained merely Stage 3 in the e-Government evolution.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to state that the UAE government did not undertake any efforts to promote public participation and collaboration through the use of social media at all. On the contrary, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid has repeatedly acknowledged the need to modernize the way citizens communicate with the authorities and take into account the growth rate of information technology and social media penetration and use in the country (The National, 2019).

Besides, in 2011, the guidelines for social media use in the public sector were released and they provide recommendations to the UAE authorities regarding the improvement of their web presence and implementation of Web 2.0 technologies for inter-agency and customer communication (Darwish, 2017). However, the study by Darwish (2017) indicated that even though a lot of governmental units in the country commenced implementing social media regularly, still not all of them do that. Moreover, it is not clear whether and how they apply Web 2.0 to engage with the public and enhance decision making and governance (Darwish, 2017). Thus, there is a need to investigate this problem in greater detail by using more recent cases from the sector.

Problem Statement

Web 2.0 technologies provide many opportunities for greater citizen participation in the public sector. In this way, they can help to enhance the design and delivery of services, as well as governance and policymaking processes (Dwivedi, et al., 2017; Zhao, et al., 2017). Previous research findings did not find evidence to support the assumptions about the use of social media by the UAE government entities in order to meet these objectives. Nevertheless, the local public sector continues to develop and it is valid to say that more examples of effective Web 2.0 utilization in the UAE public sector have appeared within a few last years. By taking a closer look at more recent cases and data regarding the use of social media by the UAE government, it will be possible to identify the extent of Web 2.0 impacts on decision making and service improvement endeavors in the country’s public sector.

Research Objectives

The aim/purpose of the study is to evaluate the impacts of Web 2.0 (independent variable) on public participation and decision making in the UAE public sector (dependent variables). This aim will be attained by meeting the following objectives:

• to analyze the literature on social media use for the enhancement of decision making and public participation, identifying the factors that either contribute or inhibit the attainment of positive outcomes.
• to locate and assess policies promoting the use of social media in the UAE and the advancement of the e-Government platform.
• to identify real-life examples and recent research evidence on social media use for customer engagement and active communication in the UAE public sector.
• to evaluate the selected examples and evidence within the context of the Government 2.0 model to identify the stage of e-Government system development in the country.
• to carry out a brief comparative analysis of findings on the effectiveness of Web 2.0 use for better decision making and public engagement in the UAE and other counties.
• to describe the implications of the conducted evidence evaluation in order to provide practical recommendations for improvement and outline future research suggestions.

Research Question

• At which stage of e-Government evolution is the UAE public sector nowadays and how successful is it in the implementation of social media for better public engagement and improvement of decision making?

Significance of the Study

As it was previously discussed, Web 2.0 can have a range of favorable impacts on the public sector. Due to the very qualities of social media, they may help governments to become more open, transparent, and sensitive to citizens’ needs. However, what is more important within the scope of the present research, by utilizing Web 2.0 to communicate with people and to monitor their feedback, governmental bodies can become able to make more informed decisions and design services that would meet the interests of a significant portion of the population more feasibly. Therefore, Web 2.0 has great potential to stimulate the growth of customer satisfaction and to build more trustful and mutually beneficial relationships between the government and citizens.

The evaluation of the current state of implementation of social media in the UAE public sector is significant because it will allow revealing whether the government is dedicated to the enhancement of public service and decision making by making it more collaborative. More importantly, it will help to get insight into the barriers to an effective transition to Government 2.0 in the state. By reviewing an extensive body of literature, research evidence, and real-life examples and analyzing them within a cohesive theoretical framework, it will be possible to outline some recommendations that could be used to facilitate the integration of Web 2.0 in the UAE public sector to make the local government more competitive and innovative.

Limitations

The lack of a sufficient number of credible research evidence on the topic of interest pertaining to the UAE context may be considered the primary limitation of the study. The scarcity of sources may prevent from achieving an optimal level of data saturation and, thus, compromise the validity and credibility of study findings. To minimize this risk, besides scholarly sources, the research will include various examples of social media use by the government located through a preliminary overview of various Web 2.0 platforms, governmental documents, and online periodicals.

Preliminary Review of Related Literature

It is valid to say that the rate of the adoption of e-Government framework by authorities in various countries across the globe has increased considerably within the last decade. Along with this, the volume of research on the issues pertaining to the use of information and communication technologies by governments has grown as well. According to Wirtz and Daiser (2016), the number of empirical studies investigating e-Government and social media use in the public sector has grown from 0 to over 120 within the period between 2002 and 2014. It is valid to say that the growing interest to the subject on part of scholars and public administrators points at its practical and theoretical significance.

Many of the available studies are dedicated to the analysis of effects of electronic means of communication on customer engagement in administrative management and decision making, as well as the factors determining one’s willingness to participate in the discussion of issues on e-Government platforms. For example, Al Khouri (2011) and Lee and Huang (2014) revealed that e-Government has the potential to improve public service quality and political efficiency by raising citizens’ awareness of various social and political matters.

Nevertheless, the degree of positive effects largely depends on various external and internal factors, including users’ digital skills, their social-economic and demographic backgrounds, as well as the availability of resources and skills needed to manage governmental online platforms and the overall level of public administrations’ web development (Lee & Huang, 2014; Vicente & Novo, 2014; Riyami & Ashraf, 2016). The latter factor is of particular importance because, unlike external factors associated with individual user characteristics, it can be controlled by governmental agencies to a large degree and may substantially define the efficacy of efforts aimed to democratize the governance process and make it more citizen-centered.

The e-Government 2.0 framework provides ideas about the meaning of the advanced digital administration systems. It suggests that sophisticated and advanced online governance platforms are characterized by networking, openness, and collaboration and encourage the development and sharing of user-generated content (Boughzala, et al., 2015). Chun et al. (2010) note that no government in the world has been yet able to meet these requirements fully.

However, the extent of social media integration in the public sector activities defines countries’ success in this regard. Charalabidis and Loukis (2012) state that Web 2.0 makes a shift from traditional, highly centralized government framework to a more people-focused Government 2.0 that comprises networking and collaboration between authorities, individual citizens, and communities as its core features. In this way, social media integration as part of a transition to Government 2.0 fosters a more feasible development of shared knowledge which, in turn, leads to greater innovation (Charalabidis & Loukis, 2012).

It can be argued that shared knowledge and innovation promoted through Web 2.0 are those primary things that contribute to better efficacy, accountability, and quality of decision making in the public sector.

Studies conducted by Dwivedi et al. (2017), Jamil (2018), and Zhao et al. (2017) revealed that social media use indeed fosters greater public engagement in the management of various administrative and political matters. It was observed that Web 2.0 is associated with elevated rates of transparency and accountability and, by making individual-government communication more flexible, it increases the level of citizens’ participation and their interest in different political and policymaking topics (Jamil, 2018; Dwivedi et al., 2017; Zhao et al., 2017).

Nevertheless, consistently with the findings by Vicente and Novo (2014), Zhao et al. (2017) and Jamil (2018) also revealed that the level of public engagement in communication with the government is unequal since some population groups have more resources and opportunities to utilize Web 2.0 than others. This factor is important to consider when analyzing the impact of social media on decision making because it increases the risk of biases which reduce the quality and efficiency of decisions made.

Concluding the literature review, it is appropriate to draw an example of how the UAE government encourages public participation through Web 2.0 to demonstrate that it is aware of the potential benefits of Government 2.0 and social media. One of them is a week-long brainstorming session launched by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum in December 2013 on Twitter. The purpose of the session was “to generate fresh ideas for developing the health and education sectors” (Sophia, 2014, par. 1).

As reported by Sophia (2014), during the week, nearly 50,000 participants posted approximately 82,000 solutions to various problems in the identified sectors. Consequently, the posts were thoroughly reviewed and the best ideas were then discussed by their authors and the government representatives on a special meeting (Sophia, 2014). Clearly, this event was a targeted effort to increase public engagement in the UAE governance and decision making. However, there is a need to look deeper into the direct and indirect effects of this and similar examples of social media use on decision making and the public attitude in the county.

Methodology

Research Design

As it was previously identified in the initial sections of the proposal, the study will aim to evaluate the extent to which social media are integrated into the UAE public sector and identify the impacts of Web 2.0 on the administrative decision making in the country. It means that the project will focus on the analysis of what, when, where, and how of the selected problem, and it is valid to say that the most appropriate research design for this purpose is the descriptive one.

According to the University of Southern Carolina (2019), the descriptive design allows researchers “to obtain information concerning the current status of the phenomena and to describe ‘what exists’ with respect to variables or conditions in a situation” (par. 8). In line with the formulated research objectives and the characteristics of the selected research design, the proposed study will not be based on any experiments but will only evaluate how the situation with the integration of social media in the public sector unfolds in the UAE environment at the present moment.

Primary Method

The collection of high-quality, rigorous empirical data on the selected topic is rather a complicated and time-consuming process, which also requires the involvement of various knowledgeable stakeholders from the UAE public sector into the sample. The obtainment of relevant approvals, as well as the consideration and the fulfillment of all ethical and administrative nuances, may not fit in the limited timeframe that the students are given for the completion of the research project. Therefore, the proposed study will be carried out by using only the secondary data retrieved from multiple credible academic, professional, and governmental sources.

Taking into account the chosen data type, the primary study method in the proposed research project will be a literature review that will have a purpose to analyze the existing body of information on the matter of interest in a comprehensive and critical manner.

As mentioned by the Charles Sturt University (2019), the major objectives of literature review as a methodology are the assessment of relationships and conceptual links among distinct variables and trends found in scholarly and professional texts, as well as the identification of potential controversies and gaps in research findings published by different authors. Thus, this study approach will help to interpret available information on the use of social media in the UAE public sector and the impacts of Web 2.0 on the administrative decision making in-depth.

Nevertheless, a narrative literature review may not be enough to analyze the topic rigorously and obtain valid findings on the issue of interest because this method normally aims just to give a superficial overview of the current knowledge. Due to this, as Snyder (2019) states, a traditional or a narrative literature review is often not thorough and rigorous enough and, there is a need for researchers interested in obtaining high-quality evidence to apply more systematic review approaches.

Overall, systematic literature reviews involve the appraisal and critical evaluation of primary evidence reported in empirical studies, which one locates with the help of very strict and narrow inclusion criteria during the stage of literature search (Snyder, 2019). Therefore, this type of literature review offers a chance to form research conclusions regarding different effects of the studied phenomena that have implications for practice and policymaking (Snyder, 2019). This method is preferable yet since there are just a few available empirical studies on the degree of social media integration in the UAE public sector, the proposed study will be carried out by using the integrative literature review method.

The integrative literature review is utilized to investigate issues and phenomena that could be researched in disparate fields of knowledge in the past and, compared to the systematic review, is less strict in terms of the inclusion criteria and selection of sources in the research sample (Snyder, 2019). Just like the traditional literature review, it provides opportunities for the detection of different themes in sources while also allowing researchers “to overview the knowledge base, to critically review and potentially re-conceptualize, and to expand on the theoretical foundation of the specific topic as it develops” (Snyder, 2019, p. 336).

Besides, integrative reviews can be conducted on either emerging or under-researched topics (Snyder, 2019). Thus, this approach will support the effort to develop a deeper insight into the under-investigated problem of social media use in the UAE public sector and their impacts on administrative decision making by combining a rigorous evaluation with a freer and more creative way of secondary data gathering and the synthesis of information from different disciplines.

Analytical Approach

The findings of the selected studies will also be interpreted with the help of the thematic analysis. This analytical method consists of several basic steps, including the familiarization with information reported by authors of the reviewed sources, the generation and definition of themes, and the selection of relevant pieces of evidence from the built datasets (Scharp & Sanders, 2018).

When speaking of themes, they can be regarded as specific conceptual similarities in the analyzed evidence from multiple texts (Scharp & Sanders, 2018), and in the proposed study, the themes will be generated based on the major ideas and principles related to the Government 2.0 model, which will consequently direct the process of finding the relevant examples from the materials in the sample and the classification of main observations and assumptions regarding the topic of interests. It means that the thematic analysis tool will help to make the literature review more consistent and logical. In addition, it will foster a better integration of the theoretical framework with evidence derived from the sample.

Ethical Considerations

All projects focused on the investigation of human subjects cannot be carried out without approval from ethical committees. According to Newson and Lipworth (2015), initial ethical reviews are essential for the prevention of both physical and psychological harm to participants. By complying with ethical standards and principles and getting rid of ethically controversial elements in study design, it is possible to increase the overall quality of research. Although the proposed study will not involve human subjects and, thus, the obtainment of approval from the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government Ethics Committee when not be needed, it will still be highly important to research the selected topic by following the codes of ethics to guarantee that the final evidence is trustworthy.

The main ethical consideration that should be taken into account by the authors of studies based on non-empirical data that they retrieve from outside sources is the acknowledgment of others’ authorship. According to Tripathy (2013), when a researcher engages in plagiarism, it means that he or she is not professional enough. Papers with a high incidence of plagiarism can neither be taken seriously nor considered valuable and, thus, others’ ideas should be properly cited in a text to avoid such risks.

Moreover, it is pivotal to double-check the accuracy and ethical nature of the collected primary and secondary data as well since it is impossible to ensure a high level of study fairness if it uses data obtained with the help of unethical methods (Tripathy, 2013). Overall, by verifying the accuracy and ethical nature of information, and by acknowledging the authorship of ideas, the proposed study will minimize the risks to its credibility and trustworthiness.

Expected Results

It is expected that the results of the proposed study will contribute to the body of current knowledge on the use of social media in the UAE public sector yet will largely be in line with previous research findings of the effects of Web 2.0 on public participation. The study will also clarify, to a limited extent, which actual effects did the integration of social media and the enhancement in public engagement levels have on local policymaking and administrative decision making. Overall, although it would be unrealistic to claim that the study will likely to reveal a significant advancement in the UAE’s e-Government platform development since the last empirical research on this topic was carried out, it is valid to presume that some progress will still be observed in this regard.

Timeline

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