Social bureaucracy? The integration of social media into government communication

Inspired by an institutional logics approach, this article analyzes the barriers to and drivers of the integration of social media in the communication practices in Norwegian ministries. Drawing on rich ethnographic data, the paper analyzes the process of integrating social media logic into government communi-cation units that were largely organized through a news media regime. To under-stand the process, it emphasizes four dimensions: how the symbolic resources, material resources, formal rules and practices have defined the logics of govern-ment communication in the period studied (May 2015–May 2016). The analysis meets the call for more empirical investigation into the interplay between the tra-ditional news logics and new digital logics.