By Authors:
Arvind Karunakaran – Stanford, Management Science & Engineering
Interviewers:
Valerio Iannucci – Boston University, Management & Organizations
Elisabeth Yang – Yale School of Management, Organizations and Management
Article link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00018392241256303
This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness. Some parts may differ slightly from the original recording.
Elisabeth: Hello, ASQ bloggers. I’m Elisabeth Yang. I’m a PhD candidate at the Yale School of Management, and my research interests are around organizational change, cross occupational collaboration, and the future of work and organizing with new technologies like AI.
Valerio: My name is Valerio Iannucci. I am a third-year doctoral student at Boston University in the management and organization department. I am broadly interested in lay people’s intrusion in professional work and contribution towards complex contemporary challenges.
Today, we’re excited to talk with Arvind Karunakaran about his 2024 ASQ article titled “Frontline professionals in the wake of social media scrutiny: Examining the processes of obscured accountability.”
Elisabeth: One of the purposes of the ASQ blog is to get authors’ insight into the processes and stories behind the final papers that we see published in ASQ. So thank you once again for joining us today. Arvind, we’re really excited to hear more about the nuts and bolts of your research process and the journey behind your recent ASQ. Before we dive into any specific questions about the paper, could you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your research interests?
Arvind: Sure, thanks again for organizing this blog. I’m a regular reader and learned a lot from the blogposts. My name is Arvind Karunakaran. I’m an assistant professor in the Management Science and Engineering department at Stanford. I’m affiliated with the Center for Work, Technology and Organizations. Broadly, my research is in the space of work and occupations with a specific interest in understanding technological and organizational changes. In particular, what sort of shifts or reconfigurations happen to how people enforce their authority in the workplace in the wake of technological change; how do they get things done; what sort of consequences does it produce if someone’s authority is not respected in the workplace and beyond? For instance, they may be a first-time manager or a racialized minority: what are the consequences in terms of perceptions of powerlessness, inclusion and exclusion in the workplace. So that’s one line of work.
The second line of work stems from the idea that with great authority comes great accountability. My second stream looks at different mechanisms for enforcing accountability in the workplace, be it professional accountability, organizational accountability, and more recently, I’m looking at algorithmic and platform accountability. Beyond just using the term “accountability” as a metaphor or a buzzword, I look at the concrete social mechanisms to enforce accountability. I am also interested in understanding how some of the new professional groups that are emerging, like sustainability professionals or algorithmic auditors, are able to enforce accountability and get things done – for instance, whatever the broad changes that they are responsible for, as well as hold themselves accountable. And then, what about these new types of more opaque technologies, like algorithmic models and platforms? How do we make sure that we keep these platform organizations accountable? Given the traditional mechanisms for enforcing corporate accountability, some of them do not cleanly translate. So my work is about thinking about new types of mechanisms and processes for enforcing accountability in the workplace, looking across a number of different settings, including the one that we’re going to talk about, police departments to 911 emergency centers to tech companies.
Elisabeth: Yeah, it’s very interesting. It seems like the paper that we’ll be talking about today is related to your second stream of work, because you shed light on a new age of professional accountability, and you mentioned in the paper that a significant social media scrutiny incident happened during your field work, and that the theoretical focus emerged organically during the process. Can you walk us through this event and how it influenced your work, data collection during field work and data analysis and the research process?
Arvind: Sure. So without getting too much into the details of the specific event per se, for confidentiality reasons, it was a police shooting incident where they misidentified a victim and a perpetrator and a Black person got shot by mistake, and obviously that created a huge controversy on social media. But the thing that I specifically noticed was who got blamed for the event, right? So my context looked at 911 emergency management organizations and police departments, as well as the coordination between them. How do they handle these emergency calls? Even though it was a cop who was involved in the incident, very quickly on social media, people were trying to figure out what went wrong, and a lot of the blame was placed on the person who took the emergency call—the 911 call-taker who took that emergency call and the 911 dispatcher who dispatched that call to the police. So, on social media, people were coming up with all kinds of theories like “the 911 call-taker, maybe they did not collect enough information about the identity of the person, or maybe they did not share them [with the police].”
So, all these speculations took a life of their own before people could actually figure out what went wrong and looked at the recordings of the call. However, because that incident took a life of its own, the top managers in this setting, both at the police department and the 911 organization, they had to make sure that they controlled the controversy on social media and signal that they are listening [to the public], that they are trying to instill some accountability, because the reputations of the organization is at stake. And thus, they ended up suspending the 911 call-taker and dispatcher associated with the event. So that’s essentially what happened in the middle of my field work, and that completely shifted the dynamics of what was happening inside the workplace [the 911 emergency center], especially on significant changes to how the call takers and dispatchers went about attending, processing and categorizing the subsequent 911 calls over the next 14 months or so. It’s a very tragic event but it also completely changed the morale and dynamics happening inside the 911 emergency management organization, which in turn created all kinds of systemic negative consequences.
Valerio: Starting from that event, how did you then decide on the theoretical framing for the first submission of this manuscript? How did that change during the research process, if at all?
Arvind: Thankfully for this manuscript, even in the first submission, it was always framed around accountability. Before it was more of a multi-level paper looking at organizational accountability and professional accountability, and how both of them sort of are related and interact with each other. But the first round of the framing was again on this puzzle: we think that the affordances of these technologies such as social media that allows for broad publicity and visibility, by making private information more public, will actually mobilize people for change. Theoretically, the prediction is that it should improve accountability. But that’s not what I observed. Under certain conditions, it could also worsen or even obscure accountability. So that was the puzzle I was trying to grapple with, and the puzzle still remained.
What changed was tweaking the framing around edges, making it centrally about professional accountability. Then, in the second round of the revision, one of the reviewers gave a really helpful comment. This reviewer suggested to draw some contrast with the existing literature on accountability and how it talks about the mechanisms for accountability in practice – mechanisms that are more top down, like supervisors and regulators, or journalists trying to scrutinize a profession. But with social media, it seemed like more organic, more sort of bottom-up. So that was something that changed, that emerged through the review process and the reviewers suggested: “Now, set up your null in a more compelling manner.” Start from what we do know, and think of an overarching term that would capture it. In this case, it is this idea of top-down versus bottom-up scrutiny for enforcing accountability.
Elisabeth: Yeah, we found that set up really compelling, because you’re really showing how traditionally these accountability evaluation criteria are set up by top-down forces, but in your case, you’re seeing how it emerges also through bottom-up dynamics. I’m kind of curious, could you reflect on what you think made the organization you studied particularly susceptible to these dynamics? Or how might this extend to other client-facing professional organizations?
Arvind: Yeah, so this particular organization is like an extreme case, and that’s why it also makes what Merton calls a compelling “strategic research site” for the type of questions I was interested in. But I would say any profession or occupation that’s at the nexus between clients, especially frontline occupations and frontline workers, those are the ones that are the most exposed. They interact with clients and the general public. For instance, you can think about triage nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. They got exposed to similar types of scrutiny because there are long wait times, and people were really unhappy, and they basically took it out on the triage nurses, right? They took videos of the triage nurses, posted them on social media, and that created a very similar type of dynamic that I observed, including in some hospitals the triage nurses categorized several incidents as “legit” medical emergencies and assigned higher priority levels to them, because they don’t want to be the target of such visible social media scrutiny. In that sense, it is generalizable to these frontline occupations.
Elisabeth: Building on that, what insights do you think you can share with organizations that might want to effectively manage these unintended consequences while maintaining accountability of its organizational members in this age of social media?
Arvind: There could be multiple trade-offs that we need to consider. One is that beyond the initial enthusiasm toward viewing new technologies such as social media as “weapons of the weak” for holding managers and people in positions of power more accountable, it turns out that the low-powered individuals are often at the receiving end of such social media scrutiny by the public.
So, rather than blindly assuming that being more accountable and receptive to public feedback is enough, we need to consider the challenges that frontline workers face. They are trying to coordinate between the organization and the public. Are there ways to provide some forms of protection, such as after-action reviews? Often, actions like suspensions or firings are taken to pacify public outcry, but over time, we see documented cases where reports are inaccurate, frontline workers were just doing their job, or their actions are taken out of context, selectively characterized or even mischaracterized. Social media is often seen as “weapons of the weak” for enforcing accountability, which is certainly true in many cases, but the targets of scrutiny also often tend to be low-powered individuals such as the frontline professionals in my setting. So being cognizant of this is important.
Another important question is why this is happening. Social media complaints and outrage are symptoms of deeper issue. People often turn to these platforms because formal channels for filing grievances, like paper-based complaints, are often slow, ineffective, or broken. When these systems fail, people turn to social media to voice their concerns, and even raise their voices to get some visibility and attention. But if the goal is to improve accountability while also protecting frontline workers from excessive social media trolling and vitriol, it’s essential to consider what’s failing in the formal channels and address those issues. These two aspects are closely connected and need to be addressed together.
Valerio: Very interesting. The paper clearly focuses on the challenges of social media scrutiny, and we were wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on what the other side of the coin might look like. Did you observe any positive consequences or constructive possibilities as the change happens? And if so, what do these looks like?
Arvind: I’ve thought a lot about this. I still remember the early days of social media, when it was proposed as an agent of change, a platform where people could voice their opinions and improve the democratic participatory process. Over time, we’ve seen how and where it actually works and where it doesn’t, and there’s now a lot of data and evidence. The way I theorize it is that social media platforms are particularly good at taking pockets of “private knowledge” or information and making them public, turning them into “common knowledge” (in the way that Michael Chwe uses the term). This, in turn, can mobilize people toward change. If you think about classic work on scandals and the public sphere, for instance, Ari Adut’s work, the idea is that what mobilizes people isn’t necessarily discovering new information, but the fact that private information becomes common knowledge, that everyone knows that everyone else knows that that is someone or something is an issue. Social media is excellent for these scenarios. Take the #MeToo movement as an example. It wasn’t that people didn’t know there was a problem with sexual harassment in Hollywood, or that Harvey Weinstein had a history. But when these facts became public, the common knowledge processes kicked in, mobilizing people to demand policy changes, stricter guidelines, and penalties for sexual misconduct. There’s evidence that it had positive effects in terms of increased accountability and representation of women, as this recent 2022 Management Science paper by Hong Luo and Laurina Zhang suggests. Social media is powerful for making private knowledge public, but it has its limitations.
One key challenge is ensuring that the information being made public is accurate, given the prevalence of misinformation, bots, and other issues. Fortunately, there are socio-technical mechanisms in place now to address some of these concerns, although their efficacy varies. However, a limitation in using social media platforms for demanding or enforcing accountability, what it is not particularly good at, is challenging what Erving Goffman would call the “definition of the situation” – or even the “definition of a phenomenon” under question. Public social media platforms are not ideal for debating foundational questions – in this context, for instance, “What is the definition of an emergency?” or “What criteria should be used?” These discussions are often better suited for private or semi-private deliberative settings, where status competition and attachment to specific viewpoints are less prominent. Once these definitions are refined, they can then be brought into the public sphere. Public debates on these topics often lead to confusion and ends up obscuring, as opposed to improving, accountability. People aren’t sure what they’re being held accountable for or what the criteria are, so they tend to play it safe. This leads to behaviors aimed at avoiding exposure, like doing the bare minimum, rather than engaging in the work correctly. And the metaphor in the paper to distill these ideas is “the glass cage”: a highly visible, circus-like environment where frontline workers are under constant public scrutiny. The gaze is on them, and their instinct is to avoid exposure by minimizing risks, even if it comes at the expense of doing their job effectively and in a professionally appropriate manner, because the meaning of doing their job effectively or appropriately is publicly changed and under flux.
Elisabeth: Yeah, we thought that the glass cage metaphor was great. So, for the final question we wanted to ask about your dissertation fieldwork, which you’ve already published several impactful papers from, including this one and then the other 2022 ASQ on status-authority asymmetry, and you have another Organization Science paper on crowd-based accountability. So as PhD students ourselves, we’d love to hear your insights into how to develop multiple theoretical contributions and multiple papers from one research setting. Though your research involves multiple settings, I guess, multiple organizations. Could you share some advice on how to do this, any best practices?
Arvind: It was not planned for sure. The paper with Wanda Orlikowski, my advisor, and Susan Scott, where we compared two different settings because they already had done the fieldwork.
To begin with, I wanted to understand, how does the dynamic between the 911 dispatchers and the police officers play out. How does the status hierarchy between these two organizations and professions play out? And are there any consequences? So, that was the subsequent paper I wrote. But that got somehow published earlier, and also, theoretically, too, it’s more, it’s before this 2024 social media paper, right? It’s looking at the fundamental dynamics between these two professions (911 dispatchers and police officers) and organizations.
The one thing I would say, though, is if you try to put everything in one paper, you’re going to get a comment that you’re trying to do too much. So that’s probably the heuristic I use, otherwise people say there’s too much going on. In fact, initially I tried to write both the papers on the status dynamics between police and dispatch and this paper on social media scrutiny into one big, unfocused sort of chapter. That was not helpful. That’s too much, so I just split them into two, and they became independent, self-contained entities in themselves. The other heuristic I use is: if there is a puzzle that you could identify and track that puzzle and answer it, well, that’s a paper. One puzzle is the status-authority paper. The puzzle was: why is it that there are people with higher formal authority but considered to be lower status? Why does that arrangement even emerge in the first place, and what are the consequences of that arrangement? What would happen if some professions are high status but lower authority and so have to listen to, and accept orders from, people belonging to another profession whom they consider to be lower status in the professional hierarchy? So that was a separate puzzle and thus became a self-contained paper.
This 2024 ASQ paper on social media scrutiny follows a different puzzle. As I mentioned, it was about the question of why is it that bottom-up scrutiny is not leading to more accountability? Therefore, you’re chunking and organizing your papers around these puzzles. And you know, following through and answering the puzzle and thinking about the boundary conditions, ultimately that’s what it takes to write a paper that is self-contained. Or at least, that’s how I think about it.
Valerio: Well, thank you very much for all of this. It’s been a very insightful and inspiring conversation. We’re grateful for the deep dive and the insights that you shared around the journey of this paper and the others. I guess we look forward to reading about the other puzzles that you’re surfacing soon.
Arvind: Thank you so much Valerio Thank you Elisabeth I enjoyed our conversations.
Interviewer bios:
Valerio Iannucci (iannucci@bu.edu) is a PhD student in the Department of Management & Organizations at the Questrom School of Business, Boston University. He is broadly interested in professional work, lay expertise, and disaster response organizing.
Elisabeth Yang (elisabeth.yang@yale.edu) is a PhD candidate in the Organizational Behavior group at the Yale School of Management. She is broadly interested in organizational change, cross-occupational collaboration, and the future of work and organizing.