How a Rational Organization Responds to an Increasingly Mediatized World

Abstract

With 64 million accounts, Vietnam ranked seventh in the world in terms of Facebook users, hence, how to control the risks and harness the opportunities of social media is one of the questions that occupy the Vietnamese elites. One of the organizations that is in the forefront of dealing with these issues is the Communist Party of Vietnam's Central Propaganda and Training Commission (CPTC), which is tasked with "maintaining the integrity and consistency" in the narrative of Vietnamese media. Employing the theory of Richard Scott (1998) on organizations as rational systems and that of Hoskins and Loughlin on mediatization (2010), this paper aims to provide an account of how the CPTC has rationally changed and adapted since the rise of social media. Through a literature review, this study finds that to deal with problems raised by social media, the CPTC has (1) since 2012 created their own social media pages to disseminate information and viewpoints that counter the "misinformation" and "misguided opinions"; (2) developed specific discourses to guide relevant discussions; (3) included "policy communication" and "media crisis management" into their agenda. Further research must be done to determine how effective these changes are in containing the risks without losing the opportunities of social media. The CPTC's actions nonetheless provide a useful lesson for how organizations could handle the increasingly mediatized world.