MANAGERIAL, GOVERNANCE AND DEMOCRATIC IMPLICATIONS OF NEW FORMS OF
CITIZEN IDM
- no particular perspective dominating in our empirical observations (Surveillance State
and the Service State): characteristics of both perspectives are visible in these case
studies simultaneously and in parallel.
- Consequently, in these emerging e-government service relationships, we can
observe that the management of access to improved, customer-focused public
services goes hand in hand with risk management
Week 4
Filmpje:
● It performance and failure → different focus this week:
○ rather than looking at specific policy problems (such as big data or
surveillance) → we are going to zoom out
■ we gaan kijken naar de impact die digital technologies have had on
governments:
1. hoe ze meer up to date kunnen zijn
3 readings to focus on:
● NPM is dead: long live digital era governance (Dunleavy, colleagues)
● pessimism, computer failure and systems in public sector… (shaun Goldfinch)
● learning from our mistakes (ingrams)
○ Samenhang van deze 3 artikelen is:
■ governments moeten totally structuren door digitalisation (vroeger
moest dit ook al zoals bij NPM)
■ goldfinches paper → highly critical view on these reforms that are
based on delivering more advanced technologie systems → costs and
risks (highly costly → reasons why governments still undertake these
performances)
■ Ingrams et al → looking at the digital era reform → in a historical
context door naar andere reforms te kijken in history → zo probeert hij
lessons te drawen → hoe kunnen we vroegere problemen voorkomen
● focussen op 2 vragen:
1. Digital era governance → are these reforms really a distraction of what is
happening know or are they an ideal picture of how they would like the
government could be
2. Open government → 3 values (transparency, participation and collaboration)
→ zijn deze drie values degenen die jij ook zou kiezen?
Artikel 1 (Dunleavy and colleagues): New public management is
dead—long live digital-era governance. Journal of public
administration research and theory
ABSTRACT
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, - The ‘‘new public management’’ (NPM) wave in public sector organizational change
was founded on themes of disaggregation, competition, and incentivization
- ‘‘digital-era governance’’ (DEG) → current and next wave of change, and we focus
on themes of reintegration, needs-based holism, and digitization changes
- Our take here highlights the central importance of information technology (IT)–based
changes in management systems and in methods of interacting with citizens and
other service-users in civil society in the underpinning and integrating of current
bureaucratic adaptations
- cognitive, behavioral, organizational, political, and cultural changes that are linked to
information systems
- ‘‘virtual state’’ or ‘‘digital government’’
- But DEG is about governance, it is not solely or even primarily about digital
changes.
THE CRISIS OF NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
- NPM is variously characterized:
- use of a repertoire of more individualistic, less hierarchical organizational
control mechanisms
- NPM as a two-level phenomenon:
1. a strongly developed and coherent theory of managerial change based on
importing into the public sector central concepts from (relatively) modern
business practices and public choice–influenced theory
The three chief integrating themes in NPM have focused on:
1. Disaggregation
- Splitting up large public sector hierarchies
- achieving wider, flatter hierarchies internally
2. Competition
- competition processes to allocate resources (in place of
hierarchical decision making)
3. Incentivization
- Shifting away from involving managers and staffs
- specific performance incentive
2. a whole string of specific inventions and extensions of policy technologies that
have continuously expanded the NPM wave and kept it moving and changing
configuration
- a key part of the appeal of these second-level changes has also been
that they fit into a wider reform movement and gain intellectual
coherence from their link with the higher-order ideas above
- Opponents NPM:
● ‘‘NPM creates heterogeneous, conflicting and fluid organizational identities,
rather than the uniform and stable business identity it is supposed to’’
● NPM’s focus on disaggregation and competition automatically increased the
numbers of administrative units and created more complex and dynamic
interrelationships among them, compared with previous PPA systems
● In addition, increased policy complexity has negative effects on levels of
citizen competence → The more difficult it is for citizens to understand
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, internal state arrangements and to operate appropriate access points to
represent their interests politically and administratively, the more their
autonomous capabilities to solve policy problems may be eroded
THE EMERGENCE OF DIGITAL-ERA GOVERNANCE
- Of course, IT systems have been important elements in shaping changes in public
administration for several decades now → Yet the waves of IT change that occurred
before the late 1990s had very limited transformative impacts
- → What is different in the current period is: the growth of the Internet, e-mail,
and the Web and the generalization of IT systems from only affecting
back-office processes to conditioning in important ways the whole terms of
relations between government agencies and civil society
- By digital-era governance we signify a whole complex of changes,
- → which have IT and information-handling changes at their center, but which
spread much more widely and take place in many more dimensions
simultaneously than was the case with previous IT influences
- the impact of DEG influences is also externally conditioned
- the impact of digital-era governance practices can be considered under three main
themes:
1. Reintegration
- partly a reaction against NPM’s emerging problems and partly reflects
digital-era opportunities
- putting back together many of the elements that NPM separated out
into discrete corporate hierarchies
2. Needs-based holism
- holistic reforms seek to simplify and change the entire relationship
between agencies and their clients
- reengineering of processes, stripping out unnecessary steps,
compliance costs, checks, and forms
- more ‘‘agile’’ government that can respond speedily and flexibly to
changes in the social environment
3. Digitization changes
- electronic channels becoming genuinely transformative, moving
toward a situation where the agency ‘‘becomes its Web site,’’
- reabsorption into the public sector of activities that had previously been outsourced to
the private sector.
- In the digital government era, citizens and businesses will increasingly co-produce
most individual outputs using electronic processes, leaving agencies to provide only
a facilitating framework.
- Een mogelijk nadeel van deze trend kan de afnemende overheidsbepalingen
zijn als gevolg van de grotere segmentatie van communicatie die gepaard
kan gaan met het internettijdperk
- Moving toward open-book government
- Creating data protection and freedom of information regimes
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, CONCLUSIONS
- Nadelen:
- people implementing conflicting NPM and DEG directions simultaneously but
unself-consciously, cross-cutting each other in counterproductive ways so as
to create chiefly a policy mess
- possibility is that NPM-educated elites may simply be so slow to change
public management in DEG directions that state agencies fall further behind
the curve of modern rationalization processes
- Even if DEG-type changes are apparently implemented as envisaged here,
there are also many voices that warn of potentially adverse consequences
and even policy disasters ahead.
Artikel 2 (Shaun Goldfinch): Pessimism, computer failure, and
information systems development in the public sector. Public
administration review
- The majority of information systems developments are unsuccessful.
- the problems of enthusiasm and the problems of control, as well as the
overwhelming complexity
- the central problem is the overblown and unrealistic expectations that many have
regarding information technology
Information Systems Failure
- Opinions differ as to whether failure is a normal part of public policy or whether it is
an unusual
- The benefits may not offset the costs of development
- a number of types of failure can be summarized:
● Project failure:
○ The project does not meet the standards agreed, including the
functions provided, budget, or completion deadlines
● Project failure:
○ The system does not work properly, including not performing as
expected, not being operational at the specified time, or not being
used in the way intended
○ Even when used as intended, the project may not generate
productivity gains or deliver the benefits expected
● Project failure:
○ Het systeem wordt niet gebruikt in het licht van gebruikersweerstand
vanwege zaken als weerspannigheid, gebrek aan opleiding en
bekwaamheid van personeel en de complexiteit van het nieuwe
systeem
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