Abstract
E-government research deals with ‘wicked’ problems that require multidisciplinary approaches to gain a full understanding. One of the main challenges of e-government is to induce change in the structure of public organizations to realize its full potential. This paper investigates e-government induced change using two complementary theoretical lenses applied to an e-government case study. We use organization theories to explore aspects of organizational structure that may change when implementating e-government and structuration theory to investigate how these aspects are affected by human action within its social structure. This combination allows us to investigate the discrepancy between the ambitions of e-government induced change and the actual changes accomplished in practice. Our analysis shows that using these two frames gives us better insight into the thorny subject of e-government than using a single theory. Further research should look into how these theories can be used to deepen our knowledge of e-government.
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van Veenstra, A.F., Janssen, M., Tan, YH. (2010). Towards an Understanding of E-Government Induced Change – Drawing on Organization and Structuration Theories. In: Wimmer, M.A., Chappelet, JL., Janssen, M., Scholl, H.J. (eds) Electronic Government. EGOV 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6228. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14799-9_1
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