Public Innovation and Organizational Legitimacy: An Empirical Analysis of Social Media in the Dutch Police

This chapter aims to enhance our understanding of the relation between
public innovation and organizational legitimacy. On the basis of the literature, we
formulate the expectation that top-down innovation results in strengthening of a
bureaucratic logic to producing legitimacy whereas bottom-up innovation results in
more emphasis on a network logic. To investigate this expectation empirically, the
chapter analyses the introduction and use of social media by the Dutch police. The
outcomes challenge the expected relation: top-down innovation resulted in a more
networked arrangement for legitimacy. We explain this finding by pointing out that the
innovation process was infrastructural and empty in content: the content was provided
through bottom-up innovation. We conclude that combinations of top-down and
bottom-up practices can form a conceptual lens for studying the involvement of
different organizational actors in processes of public innovation.