Social media adoption in the police: Barriers and strategies

Abstract

Public organizations often face numerous barriers when it comes to adopting and using social media to communicate and engage with the broader public. This research aims to better understand how barriers to social media adoption can be tackled by zooming in on one specific type of organization: the police. Our research answers the following question: to what effect do police forces manage barriers to the adoption of social media with social media policies? Firstly, by systematically reviewing previous studies using a typology of barriers to ICT adoption, this study identifies the types of barriers that the police are often faced with. Secondly, by qualitatively analyzing two frontrunner cases, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, this study analyzes how social media policies address and can help overcome these barriers. The empirical analysis indicates that in addressing barriers to social media adoption, a combination of exploration and exploitation is needed to address both structural and cultural barriers to social media adoption. We argue that this fits an approach of the ‘perpetual beta’: ongoing technological innovation requires organization capacity to continuously adapt to socio-technical change.