Social Media Support Mechanisms for Organizational Adaptation in Governmental Response to Extreme Natural Hazards

Abstract

Extreme natural hazards pose huge challenges to public administration. In the era of social media, governmental response takes the form of complex adaptive systems, applying information technology to support public organizations to interact with and adapt to each other in achieving collective performance. Using multiple sources of data on the 2016 Funing tornado, which affected Jiangsu Province, China, four mechanisms supporting the organizational use of social media (core-organization adoption, rapid message iteration, critical task orientation, and multiple channel integration) to adapt to the disaster situations are examined in the centralized public administrative context. It is found that WeChat, the most popular social media application in China, supported the timely flow of information between core organizations to execute critical tasks mainly at the initial stage of disaster response, and, in association with other information channels, improved organizational adaptation. These findings increase our understanding of governmental response to extreme natural hazards in the social media era.