West (2005) Scope, causes, and consequences of
electronic government
Three unanswered questions:
1) How much are the Internet and other digital delivery systems transforming the public
sector?
2) What determines the speed and breadth of e-government adoption?
3) What are the consequences of digital technology for public sector performance, the political
process, and democracy?
problem with answering this, was the focus on specific case studies. These are hard to generalize
to a larger universe of cases.
Conclusion:
-E-government falls more within the models of limited than transformational change.
-There are forces that restrict the ability of policymakers to make effective use of new technology.
-Social, political, and economic factors constrain the scope of transformation and prevent
government officials from realizing the full benefits of the Internet.
1991 World Wide Web was created.
-The Internet was created as a means of communication among the general public.
-Simple to use
Digital delivery systems: non-hierarchical, nonlinear, interactive, available 24/7
Muddling through process= Politics dominates, and organizations are more likely to muddle through
decisions and rely on small-scale change. Government policies typically evolve through small-scale
steps, not large-scale transformations. Gradual change overtime.
Incremental change because of:
-Institutional arrangements
-Budget scarcity
-Group conflict
-Cultural norms
-Prevailing patterns of social and political behavior
restricts the ability of technology to transform society and politics
General stages of e-government development:
1) The bill-board stage
-Display information on websites
-No interaction
2) The partial service-delivery stage
-Citizens can access, sort, and search informational databases
-Citizens are not able to personalize their website or engage in conversation with officials.
3) The portal stage with fully executable and integrated service delivery
-Dynamic and interactive
-One-stop government portals
-The entire state has one place where all agencies can be accessed
4) Interactive democracy with public outreach and accountability-enhancing features.
-System-wide political transformation
-Personalization, push technology, interactive, two-way communication
where are government agencies on the road to transformation?
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,What drives the speed and breadth of technological change?
-Financial resources and budget conditions
-Claims of groups that are well-organized
-The degree of political conflict
-Media coverage
-Political leadership
How the Internet affects the public sector, politics, and democracy:
-It is never easy to determine the ultimate impact
-Public sector: information availability, serving special populations, online service delivery,
democratic responsiveness, democracy enhancement through interactive features, and citizen trust
in government.
Gil-Garcia (2014) Revisiting the problem of
technological and social determinism; Reflections for digital
government scholars
Views on the best way to understand the relationships between technology, organizations,
individuals, and the contexts?
1) Technology can transform organizations and the way individuals behave in society.
2) Organizational and social variables influence the way technology is selected, managed, and
used.
have important limitations that affect our understanding of government information technology
initiatives.
A more integrative perspective is needed
Much of the research on digital government ends up falling into one form of determinism:
- Technological determinism
- Social determinism
Studies present their findings in a way that privileges either technology or social factors in the causal
relationships.
Technological determinism:
-All the changes that arose in modern society as a cause of technology, which forms the basis of that
society’s identity.
-Reification of technology as an autonomous agent of social change.
Determinism= Assumes that human action is caused by technology, culture or other structural
factors.
Voluntarism= Holds that human action is the product of individuals having free-will to decide and
govern themselves, and thereby social structures.
Reductionism= Reducing the complexity to explain social processes to a single independent variable.
1.0 Types of technological determinism:
1) Strong technological determinism
-Technology has its own power to enact social change and leading to a situation of
inescapable evolutionary necessity.
2) Soft technological determinism
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, -Human actors have their own agency and create their own history.
-Technology is an element in a multi-causal matrix with other factors, however technology is
the main variable.
2.0 Types of technological determinism
1) The basic type
-Comparable to strong determinism
-Technological innovations were generating cultural and institutional changes.
2) The mystic type
-Humanity renounces spiritual values, with utilitarian consequences; human beings surrender
themselves to the dictatorship of the artifacts in exchange for the benefits of modernity.
-Only way to reverse this trend is a return to faith and religion.
3) The postindustrial type
-Refers to new technological items
-New technology is transformative for both individuals and organizations.
3.0 Types of technological determinism:
1) Norm-based accounts
-Technology acquires it’s own normativity based on the logic of efficiency and productivity.
-Technology as a phenomenon that dominates the social, political, and economical areas.
2) Logical sequence account
-Technological changes result in the evolution of society, people must adapt to those
changes, regardless of their will.
-Technological change has it’s own dynamic that generate more technology, with the result
of social adaption and evolution.
3) Unintended consequences account
-The uncertainty derived from unintended consequences gives technology autonomy and
some level of control over humans,
Informational determinism= After World War II and the Cold War it’s more about getting an
information advantage rather than a material advantage.
Field of digital government:
-ICT’s are anticipated to have the power to directly transform government organizations and
enhance the benefits they give to society.
-Digital government can contribute to the formation of societal structures and social development in
general.
Social determinism:
-Reaction to technological determinism.
-Cases that seem to favor social factors over the inherent powers of technology.
-Social factors are what determine how technology is used, especially in the results from it’s
incorporation into society.
-Technology as a social product.
-Human skills and abilities to make decisions about technology are what enable its impact.
Soft technological determinism = social determinism
Social factors technology social change
Social construction of technology= Social groups, formal or informal, which are linked by a set of
meanings, define the final form of technology.
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