Frontline Professionals in the Wake of Social Media Scrutiny: Examining the Processes of Obscured Accountability

Professional accountability is considered important to the legitimacy and survival of a profession. Prior research has examined the role of top-down scrutiny by audiences, such as supervisors, regulators, and certification agencies, in improving professional accountability. But the advent of social media platforms has increasingly enabled the bottom-up scrutiny of professionals—especially professionals on the front line—by audiences such as customers and the public. In this research, I examine how and when bottom-up scrutiny through social media (hereafter, social media scrutiny) impacts the accountability of frontline professionals. Conducting an ethnography of 911 emergency management organizations, I find that social media scrutiny of 911 call-takers—the frontline professionals in this setting—can obscure rather than improve professional accountability. I elaborate on how, why, and under what conditions social media scrutiny pushes frontline professionals to deviate from their mandate, which, in turn, obscures their sense of professional accountability. These processes also generate spillover effects on the everyday work and mandate of downstream professionals (e.g., 911 dispatchers, police officers), producing a cascading set of unintended consequences that further obscures accountability for multiple actors across the professional ecosystem.