This book is among the very first books which try to understand the implications and impacts of information technology (IT) on government organizations from an institutional perspective. According to Fountain, institutional theories and their central concern, choice within constraints, span political science, sociology, and economics. Therefore, it is important to conceptualize the role of information technology within the framework and perspective of institution. The central idea of this book is to advance extends and refines institutional theory to encompass the fundamental developments in information technology. A series of research questions have been asked and tried to answer in this book. These questions include: “how are bureaucratic policymakers using networked computing? Are they negotiating new institutional arrangements as a consequence? To what extent and in what ways are they constrained by current institutional arrangement? What extensions of institutional theory are necessary to take account of fundamental change in organizational communication, coordination, and control? ” (p. 4). Fountain indicates that the purpose of this book is to build theory to answer these questions.
The first part of this book tries to set up a theoretical framework and the second part of the book contains practical cases to verify this theoretical framework. At the beginning, Fountain introduces the “reinventing government”, the National Performance Review, as the early efforts by the US federal government to open the use of information technology in government. She thinks this development coincides with the key stage of the Internet’s impressive growth began in 1993. The National Performance Review initially focused on developing regulat...
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...government institutions and provides us a clear analytic framework that enables us to further develop our understanding of the implications that IT can bring to government accordingly. Whenever trying to develop applications of e-government, e-community, e-participation, or open government, we can not forget the fact that even though technology has its strong capacities, technology determinism can hardly withstand empirical verifications. In reality, the success or failure of these applications can not be determined sorely by technology itself. We have to take into account a number of other structural, cultural, cognitive, organizational factors etc. How our perceptions and cognitions of these technology applications matter. How the embeddedness in the current institutions even matter more. This book does proved us a very comprehensive angles for such considerations.
As this critical juncture begins to take place, there has been much debate between scholars as to whether we should be enthusiastic or wary of these new changes. In Digital Disconnect and in his lectures, McChesney observes both views in an attempt to advance the discussion. On one side, the celebrants are embracing the Internet as a medium that will change society for the better. In Digital Disconnect, McChesney says, “In sum, the celebrants reaffirm one of the most important original arguments from the 1990s, that the Internet will be a force for democracy and good worldwide, ending monopolies of information and centralized control over communication” (McChesney 8). In my opinion, this celebrant view should only be regarded as a best-case scenario because of the unexpected obstacles for society that can...
OECD has noted that Electronic government particularly refers to the use of the Internet as a tool to achieve better government (OECD 2003). Effective e-government seeks to achieve greater efficiency in government performance by making services easier to access, ensure accuracy, and improved efficiency (Almarabeh and Abu Ali, 2010). While government is still seen as inefficient, ineffective, or unresponsive and depriving citizens of abilities to engage in public affairs, e-government becomes a natural extension of the technological revolution that has accompanied the knowledge society by adding new concepts such as transparency, accountability, and citizen participation in the evaluation of government performance (Mohammad et al. 2009). E-government has the potential to increase transparency in public administration by making it easier to relay information of activities to those being governed (Drüke 2007). La Porte, Demchak, and De Jong (2002) also argue that a change in current management techniques to include more collaborative relationships can help government become more efficient, effective, and
Reinventing American Federalism. Issues of Democracy: Electronic Journals of the U.S. Information Agency. April, 1997 Volume 2, Issue 2.
It has to be mentioned that the federal IT Governance model is still being considered a kind of innovation (Grembergen, 2004). Due to the number of particular reasons, it is considered to be better to contemplated than implemented (Grembergen, 2004). It is considered that local business units managers struggle to “surrender control over certain business-specific IT domains”, and to “develop business-to-business and business-to-IT partnerships” (Grembergen, 2004, 47).
It is not the goal of this paper to acquaint the reader with all of the complexities of how our government has come to function the way it does. Instead, I am simply attempting to present a basic framework for understanding what our federal bureaucracy is, and how it is theorized versus how it actually works. Ultimately, my hope is to bring all of this information together to paint a picture of our modern bureaucracy, in turn allowing us to examine the ways that our bureaucracy works for and against the interests American citizens.
Most people who are into technology feel that the best place for policy makers to start as a role is defined is what our actions should be is to preserve and maintain trust in the internet. (Strickland, 2012). According to him, we have a much higher expectation of the internet today than we’ve had in years prior to now.
At approximately the same time that media was being engulfed in corporatism came the internet boom. The first organization to really take initiative with this new medium was th...
The last half of the article addresses institutional economics, while not very clearly, he writes about the institutional changes that the internet has had on the economy, while going into a short history of the growth of the internet. The conclusion of the article involves an argument/discussion about whether or not the arguments presented in the article substantiate a "new institutional" or "old institutional" methodology versus whether or not they fall within neoclassical theory. Many questions remain unanswered through the end, and even more are raised right in the last paragraph.
Recent years have seen bureaucratic control changed thought rising of technology. In this essay, it provided a comprehensive definition about the bureaucratic control. It described the structure, rule and procedure on this control, and simply presents some of common forms in bureaucratic control. Meanwhile, it pointed out some drawback which existed in this control. Then, it described how bureaucratic control changed by new technology. That change can be helpful and also can be harmful for bureaucratism, then mainly discussed why and how it changes by several aspects and provided evidence to support this argument. At the end, it summarized all view points have been discussed in this essay.
While the internet is lowering the entry barriers to political participation today, it will not be long before it makes make politics more expensive, thus further raising the entry barriers. How does this work? Think about the internet right now. Anyone can say anything. That is great everyone has a voice. right? For now it is. As time goes by all of those “voices” start to pile up. It is just a sloppy mess. When everyone can sp...
In spite of being the home of the free, America’s government has become overly observant of the people. The internet has been an unregulated possession of the Americans since 1965, but in 2015 things could possibly change. As Americans lose privacy day by day the internet should stay free of government regulation. If the government regulates the internet it will oppress freedom of speech, deprive Americans of useful information, and the exhaustion of tax payers’ money.
Grossman, Lawrence K. The Shape of the Electronic Republic. Composing Cyberspace. Richard Holeton. United States: McGraw-Hill, 1998, 311-327.
Goldsmith, S., & Eggers, W. D. (2004). Governing by Network: The New Shape of the Public Sector. Washington, D.C.: Brookings.
Thomas, J., & Streib, G. (2005). E-DEMOCRAC, E-COMMERCE, AND E-RESEARCH: Examining the Electronic Ties Between Citizens and Governments. Administration & Society, 37(3), 259-280. doi:10.1177/0095399704273212
The Impact of Information Technology on Individuals, Society and Organizations Information systems and information technology are important in supporting, maintaining and enriching many aspects of livings. They bring benefits to lives of individuals, operations of business and the functioning of society but there are also drawbacks associated with technology and information system. Both good and bad impacts of information system and technology to individuals, organisations and the society will be discussed in detail in the following paragraphs.