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Taking Stock of the Situation

The Situational Context of Bureaucratic Encounters

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Electronic Government (EGOV 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13391))

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Abstract

This paper contributes to e-government research by presenting a conceptual framework of the key-features of the situational context that informs citizens approaches to bureaucratic encounters with government (BEs). The framework is developed through a qualitative hermeneutic approach involving several different literatures. The framework identifies five basic features of the citizen’s situation that may affect how citizens approach BE’s: 1) Consequences: the possible outcomes of the situation 2) Vulnerability: how well equipped is the citizen to deal with the possible outcomes. 3) Familiarity: how much can the citizen draw on previous experiences with similar situations. 4) Complexity: how complex does the citizen perceive her situation to be. 5) Urgency: what time-constraints are there on the citizen getting the issues resolved.

The framework can be a useful tool for analysing citizens’ strategies concerning the bureaucratic encounters and their use of self-service systems and the effects thereof for both citizens and authorities. In addition, the framework can be used by researchers and practitioners alike to analyse self-service-systems and multi-channel strategies and service designs to identify how they take the different features of the situation into account.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As Pieterson [9] has pointed out, “choice” implies an essentially rational and conscious selection between options, and this oversimplifies the issue. Pieterson and most later authors in the field, use the term “behaviour” instead. I use the terms behaviour and “approaches”. Nevertheless, the name of the subfield of e-government research is known under the name Channel-choice, so I will use the that as a label for the literature involved.

  2. 2.

    Likelihood is here not meant in a statistical sense. As Loewenstein et al. [47] argues, in our ordinary lives we do not deal in statistical probabilities but with “risk-as-feelings”.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Søren Skaarup

Authors
  1. Søren Skaarup
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Correspondence to Søren Skaarup .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

    Marijn Janssen

  2. Corvinus University of Budapest, Budapest, Hungary

    Csaba Csáki

  3. Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Ida Lindgren

  4. University of the Aegean, Samos, Greece

    Euripidis Loukis

  5. Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Ulf Melin

  6. Danube University Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria

    Gabriela Viale Pereira

  7. University of Granada, Granada, Spain

    Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar

  8. University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Efthimios Tambouris

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Skaarup, S. (2022). Taking Stock of the Situation. In: Janssen, M., et al. Electronic Government. EGOV 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13391. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15086-9_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15086-9_25

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