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doi: 10.1177/0894439303256567pmid: N/A
Fountain was concerned with the effect of information technologies on government. Her thesis was that government organizations are strongly motivated to adopt information technologies and that the ways these technologies are used and their effects vary depending on agency interests. Although Fountain claimed to present original ideas, elements of her thesis have been commonplace for decades in political science, public administration, business administration, and the field of science, technology, and public policy. Instead of crediting orthodox concepts such as technological determinism, rational actor models, incrementalism, and systems analysis, she attacked them as “shadow theories” only to import large elements of them back into her own framework. Fountain sought to dazzle us with her originality when she really was assembling a worthwhile research agenda out of good ideas taken from existing scholarship. Instead of encouraging cooperation in her modest venture, she invites a backlash.
doi: 10.1177/0894439303256728pmid: N/A
In this article, the author advances four arguments about Building the Virtual State. First, it is a historical and fails to take into account the rich and rewarding literature about information technology (IT) and government developed over the past 3 decades. Second, its theory of IT enactment is little more than a repackaging of the dominant extant theory in the field, sociotechnical systems theory. Third, evidence provided from the three case studies in the book is insufficient to test enactment (or any other) theory of IT and government. Finally, although the book claims to be about the virtual state, only one of the case studies addresses the movement of government services onto the Internet (the author's definition of the virtual state), and the other two cases do not address it at all. For these reasons, Building the Virtual State is a disappointment, and it delivers a good bit less than it promises.
doi: 10.1177/0894439303256371pmid: N/A
Jane Fountain's book, Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change, uses the International Trade Data System (ITDS) as its leading case in support of technology enactment theory and in refutation of technological determinist theory. An examination of the ITDS case in the years since the termination of Fountain's coverage in 1999 shows the case to be of a different nature than presented in the book. The weaknesses of technology enactment as social science theory are compensated by its descriptive/prescriptive uses for practitioners and researchers interested in public sector information technology implementation.
doi: 10.1177/0894439303256508pmid: N/A
This article addresses the evolution and implementation of e-government with a neoinstitutional perspective. It starts with a critique on Jane Fountain's technology enactment framework in that the framework fails to show how elected officials, public administrators, and citizens can facilitate e-government toward better democratic governance. This problem reflects the immaturity and ambiguity of neo-institutionalism in accounting for institutional change. The author argues that a balance between agent and institution, between strategic choice and institutional constraint should be maintained in analyzing the evolution of e-government as a long-term institutional change. This balanced approach would give public administration a more optimistic future of e-government.
doi: 10.1177/0894439303256372pmid: N/A
The author argues that contemporary digital information communication technologies (ICTs) facilitate new forms of e-government-enabled public sector policy making that enshrine some of the important norms and practices of e-democracy. The potential for linking e-democracy in civil society with e-government at the level of the local and national state is far from straightforward but nevertheless achievable. Following a consideration of the democratization effects of e-democracy and e-government, the author outlines how their norms and practices are converging in four principal areas: online consultations integrating civil societal groups with bureaucracies and legislatures, the internal democratization of the public sector itself, the involvement of users in the design and delivery of public services, and the diffusion of open-source collaboration in public organizations. These now feature as some of the core areas for research in this field and our broader understanding of how ICTs are reshaping governance, the state, and democracy.
doi: 10.1177/0894439303256509pmid: N/A
Jane Fountain discussed the need for government-wide or federal interagency information capacity. She concluded that the constraints of the Clinger-Cohen Act's reporting mechanisms have caused the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) to lose sight of the big picture—the need for interagency net-working and information technology (IT) oversight. However, there has been considerable behind-the-scenes work by GAO to bring about passage of legislation to increase government-wide information capacity through, for example, the E-Government Act of 2002. The act establishes (a) an Office of Electronic Government within the Office of Management and Budget and (b) data sharing between certain agencies. Much of GAO's work tends not to be reflected in reports on individual agency IT problems. However, GAO has testified of the need for more government-wide focus on IT challenges, lending support to Dr. Fountain's overall point about the need for government-wide information capacity.
doi: 10.1177/0894439303256098pmid: N/A
This article explores the body and its relation to occupational/professional knowledge to understand the gendering of work practices associated with use of personal computers (PCs) in Australian family farms. The central aim of the article is to expose the gendered interactions, understandings, and communications inherent in everyday work practices and consider how these shape relations of technology and gender. In-depth semistructured personal interviews held separately with farming women and men are used to explore relations between use of information technologies, gendered work practice, and sense of self as workers. The data demonstrate that the performative aspects of masculinity result in the appropriation of knowledge by men that genders PC use and reproduces gender hierarchies in farming.
Looker, E. Dianne; Thiessen, Victor
doi: 10.1177/0894439303256536pmid: N/A
This article provides a descriptive analysis of issues related to the access and use of information and communication technology (ICT) among Canadian youth. In particular, it examines the extent to which inequities in the use of and access to ICT exist among Canadian high school students based on gender, socioeconomic status, and rural-urban location. The analyses suggest that there is a digital divide for Canadian youth in access to and experience with ICT. Rural youth are less likely to have access to computers in the home; however, frequency of use and perceived competency levels are not compromised because they make greater use of computers at school. Female youth and those from families with low levels of parental education are also less likely to have access to computers in their homes; they tend to access computers less frequently and report lower levels of computer skills competency.
Kampen, Jarl K.; Snijkers, Kris
doi: 10.1177/0894439303256095pmid: N/A
In this article, the authors examine the possibilities of information communication technology and e-government to enhance democracy. The authors summarize the known problems of representative democracy and direct democracy and inquire whether e-government potentially can offer solutions to these problems. The authors conclude that a lot of problems in both representative and direct democracies remain unsolved and that e-government even can create new problems.
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