The Hidden Side of Transparency Among Government Agency Bloggers

This paper shows and discusses blogs as social action in a corporate context by investigating and seeking to understand organizational bloggers’ motivations and discursive behaviors in the contextual and cultural diversity of a blog-setting. Providing empirical findings on the possibilities and limitations that are embedded in an organizational blog in a government agency context, traced through focus group interviews of the organizational bloggers, the paper shows that culturally bound limitations exist and are exposed when implementing an open-source social technology like the weblog.The paper pinpoints the problematic of transparency through pointing out conflicting goals, roles and the resulting self-censorship by bloggers as they operate in an environment that is increasingly transparent, and shows examples of how the group of bloggers with the shared narrative tradition is able to mobilize its members and create subgroups for appropriate blog behaviors and changing behavior due to self-censorship, as well as identification with the key actors in the group.