Social media-enabled crisis response in Vietnam: A tương thân tương ái perspective

A growing amount of information systems (IS) research is examining the use of social media to enable effective crisis response. However, existing studies have overlooked the impact of indigenous concepts, which play an important role in crisis response. Our study intends to offer an indigenous perspective to this research stream by examining how social media-enabled crisis response is enacted in Vietnam. We used COVID-19 as the focal crisis and collected a rich set of discussion threads from social media. By analysing the data through the grounded theory method, our study identifies the indigenous theoretical concept of tương thân tương ái. We further unveil a process model consisting of six mechanisms through which tương thân tương ái inspires crisis response on social media and three roles assumed by social media during this process. Our study contributes to the literature on social media-enabled crisis response by providing an indigenous perspective and a context-specific explanation. It also enriches IS theory in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) by investigating how the indigenous concept of tương thân tương ái influences Vietnam's crisis response on social media. Our findings also provide guidelines that can help communities beyond Vietnam to promote the values of tương thân tương ái during crisis response.