Digital facilitation-as-a-process: The mismatch between promotional text and situated interaction

• Modern work is characterized by the ideologies of the New Work Order. • Digital tools are designed to make traditional top-down leadership more egalitarian. • Promotional website of a platform reconstructs the ideals of ‘doing facilitation’. • Organizations do not orient to these ideals in their in-situ use of the tool. • Existing hierarchies and leadership formats are maintained rather than challenged. This paper examines facilitation-as-a-process, which is characterized by its aims to challenge the traditional top-down leadership formats by empowering employees to achieve their goals without control. In this sense, the idea of facilitation reflects the ideologies of the New Work Order. By looking at both a promotional website of a digital platform and the use of this platform in situated interaction, the study shows how these ideologies are (re)constructed in and through promotional texts and how the claims are or are not enacted in actual in-situ interaction in two organizations. Drawing on critical discursive psychology and the distinction of Discourses (big-D) and discourse (little-d), it is first shown that New Work Order ideals are reconstructed on the website by relying on two key Discourses: The Discourse of Empowerment and the Discourse of Textualization. Secondly, using authentic chat discussions from two organizations, it is shown that the organizations do not orient to these ideologies presented on the website, but rather maintain and reproduce more traditional patterns of interaction, similar to, for example, classroom interaction. In this respect, the study shows how the promise of changing the traditional leadership formats and empowering employees, as presented in the facilitation literature and the platform’s promotional texts, remains purely ideological.