Suchergebnisse

Part 3: Open Government and Transformation ; International audience ; The idea of participation and demand driven development is not unique for the applied area of development of public e-services, it has for long been an issue in development stands and has moved relatively unchecked from the margins to the mainstream of development since mid 1980s. The promise of empowerment and transformative development has though been severely questioned during the past decade in development research and practice in lack of sufficient evidence that the idea is living up to the expected standards. However, in eGovernment, demand driven development of public e-service is on the contrary growing. Expectations such as enhanced use, better services and more efficient resource utilization are expressed in different contexts. In this article the idea of demand driven development of public e-services is analyzed discursively in order to gain a deeper understanding of how the narrative is told, retold and challenged. The results show that from a design perspective it is rewarding to acknowledge both the dominant, hidden and contrasting stories in order to understand challenges in development work.

Part 5: Participation and eServices ; International audience ; The notion of citizen driven development of public e-services has been vivid for a number of years in eGovernment research, practice and policies. A variety of expectations are coupled with the idea of citizens participating in the development process; ranging from, roughly outlined, more efficient services (economic gain and customer satisfaction) and enhanced democracy (deliberation and empowerment). There are less conceptual analyses resting on a critical stance analysing how this notion is translated in practical settings, leaving a gap in between for practitioners to solve. This paper presents explorative work made in a Swedish authority, setting out to understand their structure, and the available methods used, in relation to the concept. The results show that besides difficulties in creating systematic work processes, what surfaces is the complex task of estimation.

What is identified as a problematic area in this thesis is our different relations with information technology which creates inequalities between possibilities to enjoy the advantages, or suffer the disadvantages, of the information technological development. The first step in addressing this area is to start with our conceptions of technological development, voluntaristic or deterministic, and the first argument is that it is important to create an awareness of our relation with technology. This thesis presents a perspective (with the help of social constructionism) which holds a possible method to create better conditions for awareness and finally, another relation. The relationistic approach highlights what sometimes is labelled the therapeutic purpose of IS (i.e. to create a mutual understanding between different agents through negotiated arrangements) which prevents some agents to be treated as inanimate objects instead of fellow human beings. And techno therapy not only for the IS researchers but for the change agents at the political level and perhaps most importantly, for the users themselves so that they will be able to formulate, communicate and mediate their needs and wishes. The aim is to come up with tools and instruments for creating opportunities for as many as possible to in an enlightened and equal way make their own choices regarding information technology use.

Part 7: Evaluation ; International audience ; Electronic government, or e-Government, is the use of information and communication technology in the public sector. As a research field, it is characterized as multi-disciplinary with heritage from both the information systems and public administration fields. This diverse background may be beneficial, but it may also result in a fragmented theoretical base and conceptual vagueness. This paper applies decision theory to e-Government to tie a number of theoretical and practical concepts together. In particular, five concepts from decision theory (i.e. objectives, stakeholder inclusion, weighting and resource allocation, risk analysis, and outcomes assessment) are compared with counterparts in e-Government. The findings have both theoretical and practical implications. First, they add to and unite e-Government theory. Second, practical methods for operationalizing the theoretical concepts are proposed. This operationalization includes using a holistic approach to e-participation throughout decision processes.

Though 'digitalization' has become a buzzword and policy objective in public-sector development, the struggle to grasp and define it as a modern phenomenon continues. Furthermore, research has long shown that it is difficult to extract the value with which digitalization is associated. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to uncover the enactment by a specific set of actors of digitalization as production and reproduction practices. We interviewed a group of governmentally sanctioned regional digitalization coordinators to identify how digitalization was translated and implemented by the appointed professionals. We applied Orlikowski and Gash's three levels of technology (nature, strategy, and use) and combined these with Feenberg's matrix of four views on technology to produce an analytical framework. Our findings show that the making of digitalization can be described like 'nailing jelly to a wall', owing to the lack description of its capabilities and functionalities, coupled with a raison d'etre that is highly elusive beyond 'change', in very general terms.

We are surrounded by narratives about digitalization – in media, in white papers, in policies and in academic discourse. This article aims to dissect policy narratives to unveil the dominant stories associated with digitalization and open a dialogue on their consequences. The empirical material includes policy documents on digitalization at the European Union, national and sub-national levels focusing on the Swedish context. The article argues that these documents not only produce narratives of digitalization that reveal a certain orientation towards reality but also become tangible constructs. Further, despite their neutral language, they should be considered part of the problem formulation. The analysis is carried out by identifying the dominant and taken-for-granted stories, and the results show that digitalization, often portrayed as a modern and innovative concept, is frequently narrated in line with rather traditional perceptions of industrialized modernity. The results indicate that digitalization is trapped in an unambiguous and cramped dramaturgy, and if policies are enacted in the same way in practice, we will face a rather un-resilient digital modernity.

The aim of this paper is to study over- and under representational practices in governmental expert advisory groups on digitalization to open up a dialogue on translations of digitalization. By uncovering how meanings converge and interpretations associated with technology are stabilized or maybe even closed, this research is positioned within a critical research tradition. The chosen analytical framework stretches from technological culture (i.e., how and where the myths and symbolic narratives are constructed), and a focus on the process of interpretation (i.e., the flexibility in how digitalization could be translated and attached to different political goals and values) to a dimension of firstness (addressing education, professional experiences and geographical position to explore dominance and power aspects). The results reveal a homogeneity that is potentially problematic and raises questions about the frames for interpreting what digitalization could and should be and do. We argue that the strong placement of digitalization in the knowledge base disclosed in this study hinders digitalization from being more knowledgeably translated.

According to narrative trends, digitalization has the potential to deconstruct existing power structures and increase participation and democracy in society; however, we will argue, it is unable to accomplish these changes on its own. Specifically, the deconstruction of existing structures cannot happen through digitalization alone; instead, these results depend on how digitalization is done. It is important to focus on understanding what happens in the digitalization process, what is transformed, as well as when it is done, and by whom. We will, therefore, combine a policy enactment framework with a critical analytical framework of digitalization to create a possibility to address the institutional power aspects of digitalization in a specific setting i.e., cultural heritage. We do this by analyzing how policy enactment, which is a way to understand policymaking as a process of organizational interpretations and translations by diverse policy actors, affects the construction of cultural heritage. The results show how digitalization easily becomes a process that is unable to question, it tends to engulf all other values, and cultural heritage is turned into meta-data, getting 'clicks' on the internet and attracting tourists to the region.

According to narrative trends, digitalization has the potential todeconstruct both power structures and practices of exclusion insociety. What we argue here is that this deconstruction is not theresult of digitalization alone, it is dependent on how digitalizationis done. On the contrary, digitalization has often resulted inreproduction instead of transformation and deconstruction, i.e.digitalization tend to uphold practices instead of challengingthem. Being slightly more provocative, what becomes digitalizedis often what we can easily capture and understand. Similarly,when we open up for an increased participation in the creation ofdigital artifacts (sometimes expressed as demand-driven, citizencentered,or participatory development), those participating indigitalization are often already known; the use of alreadyestablished contact channels making them easy to reach andconnect with. Such logics raise questions about the intersectionsof norms and power and the potential transformative character ofdigitalization. The aim of this paper is to, through a theoreticalframework combining critical information systems, policyenactment and norm critical design, introduce a reflexive designmethod to gently provoke norms. We analyze the need tointervene in the everyday practices of digitalization. This is donein an empirical case study of the making of a regional digitalcultural heritage portal. The results indicate that digitalizationneeds norm critical interventions to change existing practices andprevent norm reproduction. Otherwise, as in this case of thedigitalization of cultural heritage, digitalization runs the risk ofstrengthening existing power structures and excluding practicesinstead of challenging them.

Electronic government, or e-Government, is the use of information and communication technology in the public sector. As a research field, it is characterized as multi-disciplinary with heritage from both the information systems and public administration fields. This diverse background may be beneficial, but it may also result in a fragmented theoretical base and conceptual vagueness. This paper applies decision theory to e-Government to tie a number of theoretical and practical concepts together. In particular, five concepts from decision theory (i.e. objectives, stakeholder inclusion, weighting and resource allocation, risk analysis, and outcomes assessment) are compared with counterparts in e-Government. The findings have both theoretical and practical implications. First, they add to and unite e-Government theory. Second, practical methods for operationalizing the theoretical concepts are proposed. This operationalization includes using a holistic approach to e-participation throughout decision processes.

In January 2008, the Swedish Government launched a new eGovernment action plan which was formulated to serve as "a new basis for IT-based organisational development in public administration". The main objective in the plan was formulated as "as simple as possible for as many as possible". The definition of eGovernment used in the action plan is the one agreed upon by many other European countries: "eGovernment is organisational development in public administrations that takes advantage of information and communication technologies (ICT) combined with organisational changes and new skills". Behind the suggested course of actions there is a rhetoric that Sweden was now entering a new path regarding eGovernment development. Taken together the declarations in the plan made it and the expressed expectations of profound changes in public administration an interesting target for critical review.Having identified the importance in critically discussing and analysing the action plan, the Swedish Researchers Network in eGovernment (www.egov.nu) arranged a network meeting at the national conference for public sector in Sweden June 2008. The theme for the meeting was "Reflections on the Swedish action plan for eGovernment". Several researchers and practitioners shared and debated their reflections during this meeting. In order to continue this very interesting discussion after the conference, we then invited authors to submit an article on the same theme, i.e. analysing different aspects of the Swedish action plan for eGovernment. This call for papers was directed both to participants at the network meeting and others, who wanted to contribute to this on-going debate. The call was to encourage authors to communicate and share their insights and opinions regarding the action plan in order to provide knowledge to decision-makers and other practitioners. ; Editorial