DETERMINANTS OF ORGANIZATIONAL MEDIATIZATION: AN ANALYSIS OF THE ADAPTATION OF SWEDISH GOVERNMENT AGENCIES TO NEWS MEDIA
| Author | THOMAS SCHILLEMANS,JOSEF PALLAS,MAGNUS FREDRIKSSON |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/padm.12184 |
doi: 10.1111/padm.12184
DETERMINANTS OF ORGANIZATIONAL
MEDIATIZATION: AN ANALYSIS OF THE ADAPTATION
OF SWEDISH GOVERNMENT AGENCIES TO NEWS
MEDIA
MAGNUS FREDRIKSSON, THOMAS SCHILLEMANS AND JOSEF PALLAS
This article seeks to explain why the media affect some governmental agencies more than others. We
develop a measuring instrument for the mediatization of agencies; gauging how they adapt to the
media. We analyse the effects of six potential explanations of mediatization: media pressure, orga-
nizational size and task, salience, geographic location, and management structure. The analysis is
based on a comprehensive quantitative contents analysis of policy documents from all governmen-
tal agencies in Sweden. The results show that agencies’ propensity to adapt to the media is mainly
determined by their management structure rather than, as could have been expected, by media pres-
sure. Organizations managed by career managers invest more in media management than those led
by eld-professionals. Our results suggest that agencies have substantial agency in terms of how
they cope with the media and that mediatization refers to much more than passive adaptation by
organizations.
INTRODUCTION
Government agencies in modern welfare states operate with varying and variable levels
of formal and informal autonomy from politico-administrative centres (Christensen and
Laegreid 2007; James and Van Thiel 2011). As the agencies become more or less indepen-
dent from their political constraints, they seek to develop distinctive brands and identities
(Pollitt 2003; Eshuis and Klijn 2011) and make investments in their capabilities for strate-
gic interactions with external actors such as the media (Schillemans 2012; Van Thiel 2012).
Effective interactions with the media, however, come with strings attached: they neces-
sitate that organizations adapt themselves, at least to some degree, to the rules of the
game of the media – that is, to the media logic (Altheide and Snow 1979; Esser and Matthes
2013). This adaptation is analysed in the growing literature on the mediatization of politics
(Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; Landerer 2013; Strömbäck and Esser 2014), the public sector
(Schillemans 2012; Thorbjornsrud et al. 2014), and organizations (Pallas et al. 2014).
A number of recent studies on the mediatization of public sector organizations have
described how government agencies set aside substantial resources for media manage-
ment and adapt their organizational structures, processes, and rules (Deacon and Monk
2001; Maggetti 2012; Thorbjornsrud et al. 2014). These analyses suggest that there are
important variations in the degrees to which agencies adopt and internalize the media
logic into their operations and organizational structures. This begs the question of causa-
tion: why do some organizations go further in adapting their structures, processes, rules,
and activities to the media than others?
The existing literature on mediatization has highlighted a number of macro-
determinants of mediatization, such as the ICT revolution, the crisis of the political
party system, and the commercialization of the media (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999; Van
Magnus Fredriksson is in the Department of Journalism, Media & Communication, Gothenburg University, Sweden.
Thomas Schillemans is in the School of Governance, Utrecht University,The Netherlands. Josef Pallas is in the Depart-
ment of Business, Uppsala University,Sweden.
Public Administration Vol.93, No. 4, 2015 (1049–1067)
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
1050 MAGNUS FREDRIKSSON ET AL.
Noije et al. 2008; Hjarvard 2013). These macro-explanations are valuable and relevant for
a wider understanding of how mediatization affects different parts of society, but they
cannot explain variations on the meso-level of organizations.
In order to provide a more ne-grained analysis, this article explores six competing
explanations of mediatization. They focus both on exogenous factors such as media pres-
sure and political pressure, and on endogenous characteristics such as task, resources,
management structures, and geographical location. The study rests on quantitative
content analyses of policy documents and written internal instructions of Swedish gov-
ernment agencies. In the end, the agencies’ management structure is found to be most
important, suggesting that the mediatization of government agencies is best under-
stood as a pull (organizations wanting to interact with the media) rather than as a push
(organizations forced to adapt).
MEDIATIZATION OF POLITICS AND POLICIES
The mediatization of politics is highly topical in the current literature in political com-
munication and related elds (Hjarvard 2013; Landerer 2013; Strömbäck and Esser 2014).
Mediatization is a general concept which has been applied to a wide array of issues, and
seems to be the answer to a variety of urgent questions (Schulz 2013) in times of the
‘mediatization of everything’ (Hepp 2013). The general idea is that mediatization refers
to processes where non-media entities (in our case government agencies) adapt to the
logics of the media (Hjarvard 2013). Mediatization refers to a process of transformation,
where the original logics in a eld or organization give way to the specic logics of the
media. Mediatization is, consequently,a form of ‘colonization’, where external media logic
gains ground in non-media contexts (Mazzoleni and Schulz 1999). It is understood that the
media operate (relatively) independently from politics and according to their own institu-
tional logic. The media have simply become more powerful as an institution which affects
other societal institutions. Politics thus becomes increasingly dependent on the media as
the most important source of information in society and, as a consequence, political entities
are increasingly guided by media logic (Strömbäck and Esser 2014, p. 8).
A large part of the literature on political communication focuses on the macro-level of
societal institutions; mainly on changes in the relationships between the media and poli-
tics (Schulz 2004; Strömbäck 2008; Hjarvard 2013). ‘Politics’ can be broken down into three
distinctive elements: ‘polity’, ‘policies’, and ‘politics’ (Strömbäck and Esser 2014, p. 15).
The lion’s share of existing empirical work focuses on the mediatization of political actors.
Strömbäck and VanAelst (2013, p. 344), for instance, explore the mediatization of political
parties in three consecutive steps. First, political parties invest in specialized media of-
cials. Second, the executive media person becomes part of the ‘dominant coalition’ within
the party. A third step is that political parties modify their selection criteria for positions
and focus more and more on candidates who are good media performers. Others have
demonstrated the mediatization of politics over time through analyses of parliamentary
activities (Kepplinger 2002), the news coverage of election campaigns (Strömbäck and
Dimitrova 2011), and longitudinal survey data of MPs (Elmelund-Præstekær et al. 2011).
Our analysis of the mediatization of agencies builds on existing research, yet extends it
in two ways. To begin with, our focus is not on the mediatization of ‘politics’ but on ‘poli-
cies’; government organizations responsible for policy implementation. Recent studies
have shown that government agencies appear in a large share of the daily news cov-
erage in the UK, Australia, and the Netherlands (Deacon and Monk 2001; Schillemans
Public Administration Vol.93, No. 4, 2015 (1049–1067)
© 2015 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
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