Coordinating organizational resilience through social media : a case study of 2015 Tianjin explosions

Abstract

As a type of applications in social media, Microblog like Twitter, Weibo are in common use by public. Through social media, users are able to public, transfer and share information through the online social network. A series of research shows the application of social media in disaster management thanks to its efficient information propagation. The Chinese government organizations are aware of the importance and value of social media and has joined into Weibo. This study tries to find out how Chinese government organizations perform in social media during disaster management and their coordination with each other, as the coordination is the part that cannot be ignored in system behavior. Based on the research of organizational performance in social media, the study tries to find out whether there is a relationship between interorganizational coordination in social media and organizations’ disaster resilience, which is the capability to recover from a disaster. The study then tries to provide some advices for government to enhance their performance in social media. The study provides a framework showing the relationship between disaster coordination of organizations in social media and disaster resilience. The framework includes 3 variables: Organizations’ disaster resilience (dependent variable), Social media (moderating variable) and interorganizational network (independent variable).The study uses the event 2015 Tianjin Explosions as the case study. Sina Weibo is the primary source of data, which is one of the most popular social media platform in China containing over a hundred thousand official accounts built by government organizations in mainland China. An evaluation system of disaster resilience is used to measure the performance of government organizations in 2015 Tianjin Explosions. A combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis was used in the analysis part.