Crowdsourcing in Public Management: Current Research and Future Directions

The sweeping progress of Web 2.0 technologies and capabilities has been welcomed as a shortcut to the democratization of public management. Although there is a large amount of research investigating the power of crowdsourcing in dealing with challenging public problems, few studies have elaborated what have been achieved and what should be done. This paper seeks to present a critical examination of the substrate of crowdsourcing research in public management base on the Bibliometrics and Visualization Analysis of the selected literatures. Subsequently, we develop a comprehensive analytic framework of crowdsourcing in public management and identify several important research directions for scholars. In accordance with design focus, problem focus, process focus, actor focus and outcome focus, the existing literature has demonstrated five research domains. Nevertheless, this field is still in its infancy, the theoretical foundations are weak, and the practical effects are controversial. Future research should be done to explore this emerging field from a broader perspective, with deep analysis of the participants, public organization and system management in crowdsourcing in public management.