The Metamorphosis of an Open Government Data Initiative: Unfolding the Transitioning Processes of Digitally-enabled Temporary Organization

Adapting to the fast-evolving technologies today, public IT projects are increasingly delivered through pilot collaborations between public and private stakeholders that are mediated by collaborative platforms. As these pilot projects develop into long-term projects, a key challenge is to identify the appropriate organizational form of these projects in the face of institutional complexity, where divergent demands of multiple institutional logics operate next to, or even oppose to, each other. Following the formation of an open government data project in Shanghai, China longitudinally (2015-2017), this paper delineates a digitally-mediated hybridization process through which the stakeholders combine the competing logics of community, local bureaucracy and corporate into different temporary organizations over time. Our findings highlight the stakeholders’ strategic use of collaborative platform in the hybridization process as a repository of shared knowledge and experiences for reproducing divergent institutional logics, and a virtual sandbox for building and experimenting different organizational forms.