Mittuniversitetet

The authors of this chapter suggest that e-government is best understood as a mythologised megatrend. They argue that it has become a symbol for the modernised government of today. A symbol which, in some sense has to be demythologized in order to be realised. The authors suggest that by analysing general and specific interpretations, the myth can be partially unravelled, which is illustrated by a large scale study based on 2624 employees in public administration. The authors suggest a loose coupling between the general and the specific level.

As a consequence of the advance of information technology into the realm of public administration, we are now faced with a potential increase in efficiency of a scope and power not previously seen. The intentional use of information technology to modernise the public sector goes internationally by the name of e-Government. While e-Government’s greatest impact thus far has been to promote customer satisfaction, its guiding spirit is more ambitious, with the fundamental reorganisation of the entire public sector in its sights. The overall purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of how public administration at a local authority level adapts to impending e-Government by considering the discourses that are manifested and how they are used to understand and legitimise electronic administration. The present study uses critical discourse analysis to shed light on those discursive orders that are revealed in the course of deliberations on electronic administration at the local government level. On the one hand, it is possible to see electronic administration as a refinement - and a reform - of a bureaucracy’s techniques. On the other hand, it is equally possible to view it in the light of free market ideology.

The idea of eGovernment is moving rapidly within supra-national and national and local institutions. At every level leaders are interpreting the idea, attempting to grasp either the next step or indeed the very essence of the idea itself. This article outlines a diagnostic framework, resting on three different dimensions; translation, interpretative frames and sensemaking, to create knowledge about the translation processes and by doing so, emphasize enactment rather than vision. The diagnostic framework is then empirically examined to explore its possible contribution to the understanding of the complexity of leader’s translating and mediating the idea of eGovernment in their local context. In conclusion it is noted that the diagnostic framework reveals logic of appropriateness between local mediators, eGovernment, different areas of interest and appropriate organizational practices.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to analyse everyday practices in e-government from a labour perspective in order to understand how administrative rationalization and citizen service become connected in the organizational restructuring of the labour process, namely job codification and specification and rule observation.

Design/methodology/approach – The analysis applies an organizational e-government implementation perspective and labour process theory to an analysis of a Swedish municipality's implementation of e-government, using both qualitative and quantitative data.

Findings – The main finding is the formulation of two distinct types of ideal employee – “monotonized administrators” and “personalized bureaucrats” – who carry e-government work in different directions according to administrative rationalization and the service offered citizens.

Originality/value – The paper extends our knowledge of everyday practices in e-government from a labour perspective. It offers practitioners as well as researchers new insights by analysing the transformation of practice as an ongoing process, characterized by micro-political translation processes amongst actors, actions, and meanings in both rhetoric and practice.