E-government: towards the e-bureaucratic form?
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Research article
E-government: towards the e-bureaucratic form? Antonio Cordella Department of Management, Information Systems and Innovation Group, London School of Economics, London, UK Correspondence: A Cordella, Department of Management Information Systems and Innovation Group, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK. Tel: þ 44 20 7955 6031; Fax: þ 44 20 7955 7385; E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract Bureaucratic institutions not only provide mechanisms to coordinate work activities in the public sector, but also serve to enforce the democratic values of equality and impartiality. This paper explores how recent approaches to e-government neglect these important dimensions of bureaucracy and proposes an alternative approach to e-government. This paper sets the wider new public management reform context to help explain some of the difficulties the NHS IT Projects are running into by 2007. The e-bureaucratic form is proposed as an e-government solution, which, while taking advantages of the information and communication technology as means of coordination, also help to enforce the values of equality and impartiality underpinned through the actions emanating from bureaucratic structures. Journal of Information Technology (2007) 22, 265–274. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jit.2000105 Keywords: e-bureaucratic form; e-government; new public management; transaction costs; IS for the public sector; bureaucracy
Introduction he diffusion of electronic business (e-business) and electronic commerce (e-commerce) technologies in the private sector has made governments worldwide profoundly interested in information and communication technology (ICT). Using an array of ICTs, governments worldwide aim to redesign dramatically many areas of government activities – from public procurement to welfare interventions. An example can be seen in the set of NHS projects debated in this Special Issue. However, just as the private sector realised that e-commerce was not just the development of websites, but more like an ‘octopus’ with tentacles in all of a business’s operations (Clegg et al., 2002), the public sector has to become more aware of the effects e-government projects can have on the nature of the services a government provides to its citizens. So far the dominant literature has seen e-government as a next step in the rationalisation of government activities along the line of new public management (NPM) (Bellamy and Taylor, 1998; Fountain, 2002; Heeks, 2002) even if, as it will be discussed in this paper, there are critical positions against this assumption (Dunleavy et al., 2005). Efficiency, accountability, decentralisation and marketisation are the main drivers of NPM policies. Competition is envisaged as a force that foster reforms and the redesign of the organisation in
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order to increase governmental efficiency and effectiveness while retaining equity (Lane, 1997). Along these lines, Osborne and Gaeble
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