What is Legitimization

Crowdsourcing online has been popularly utilized especially among business organizations to achieve efficiency and effectiveness goals and to obtain a competitive advantage in the market. With the governments' increasing interest in using information and communication technologies for a variety of purposes, including generation of public value(s) and innovative practices, online crowdsourcing has also entered into the public administration domain. Accordingly, studies have investigated critical success factors for governmental crowdsourcing, or explored citizen participation in crowdsourcing activities in case studies. However, governmental decision to adopt online crowdsourcing as innovation has not been sufficiently examined in the extant literature. The objective of this chapter is to propose a theoretical model that explains the government adoption of crowdsourcing. Based on the review of case studies on governmental crowdsourcing, an integrated theoretical model of factors affecting government crowdsourcing decisions is developed.